Great Ninja Onizuka
by Lousy Poet Automaton
Summary: A mysterious civilian's presence changed the course of Iruka's destiny, and through him, that of the world. Iruka becomes a reflection of what he could have always been, and brings out the same in his students. Naruto/GTO/Hokuto Shinken/Azumanga Daioh
1. Crazy Life

"Sorry, Iruka. You're my buddy... But I'm going to make chuunin before you do."

They circled each other slowly. It had been a long summer, and in this clearing, the earth was dry and cracked. The dust rose as their feet slid through it. One teenager's blood dripped into the dirt.

"Shut up asshole."

Iruka muttered curses as he focused his senses. His Bro kept telling him he let up on his awareness when he wasn't fighting. He would be getting yelled at for days after he finally got through this.

He could just picture the guy standing over him, the veins in his neck bulging, the handsome face twisting into a truly grotesque expression, forehead rippling alarmingly, teeth bared in an awesome grimace, nostrils flared, the whole ugly package screaming out "What the fuck!" without having to say a word.

Then Iruka would have to say something like, "Dude, Mizuki's pretty good at ambush tactics. It's what he's best at!"

And then sensei would probably hammer his fist down on Iruka's head while saying, "I keep telling you the perfect assassin never gets snuck up on. Now you have cleaning duty for the whole week."

Iruka winced, imagining that big fist whacking him on the skull. At least sensei would probably treat him to a beer after the dressing down.

"Oh, does that hurt, Iruka-kun? Man, you always act like such a tough guy. It's just a couple of shuriken to the shoulder. I think I nicked some tendons though. You should just give me your scroll already."

Right. The blood was soaking his left sleeve down to the cuff. Damn, it would be irritating trying to wash that out. And he'd have to sew the cut himself.

"Just thinking that I hate laundry, 'buddy.' Whatever. Let's do this."

Iruka grinned as he charged at the other, a vicious smile that was also perfectly content. Yeah, nevermind tomorrow, or even five minutes from now. Whatever happened, his sensei, the man who was sometimes a brother and sometimes a father to him, would be there, with a big-ass fist ready along with an easy smile and a beer.

Poor Mizuki. What was the guy thinking getting this close to him? Just because Iruka's shoulder was wounded.

"What the... A ninja should know when to give up, you know!"

"I can beat you with one hand tied behind my back," he answered back as he attacked, laughing.

Iruka side-stepped more blurringly fast kunai as he continued rushing forward, merely angling a bit to the left or right.

He smashed his elbow into Mizuki's face. No sensation of teeth giving way, of lips getting mashed.

As expected, the stricken genin puffed away into a shattered piece of lumber.

He sensed the knife sweep out at his right kidney from behind and performed the same bit of ninja trickery, and then Mizuki was screaming, "Ohhhh shiiiiiiit!" as Iruka appeared behind him, wrapped his massive right arm around his opponent's chest and pulled him off his feet.

Iruka's feet were chakra-bonded to the earth below for extra stability, and sheer muscle did the rest as he kept a tight grip on his smaller opponent and, as he arched his back in a perfect bridge, shoulder and back and leg muscles bulging and clenching, he gleefully called out "One-armed suplex of domination!" It was fair to give the guy proper warning, and hopefully, he would have enough time to brace his neck with chakra so he did not get it broken. Maybe the guy would even get up after this! Then he could crank it up and have himself a real fight!

Mizuki's head and the back of his neck slammed into the hard earth. A cloud of dust was thrown up around them.

"Oh, yeah! Who da man!"

Iruka bent low over Mizuki and peeled his eyelids back. He probed at the little guy's neck. Right, he had done the move just fast enough so that Mizuki could not escape, but slow enough so that Mizuki could somewhat protect himself and not get killed.

"Poser! I took you out in one move. Yeesh."

Iruka whistled tunelessly as he patted down his former classmate. He took the guy's extra kunai, shuriken, bandages, water canteen, garrote, socks, flint and tinder. For good measure, he also took the cash out of his wallet. Who brings cash to a survival exam anyway? Dumbass.

"Ah-ha! Score!"

Two scrolls. He wondered who Mizuki had ambushed to get the other scroll, or if his team's scroll was with someone else and he had already gotten two and was just being stupidly greedy trying to get Iruka's.

"Hrrm." It just would not do to leave the guy there like that.

So he took the time to tie him up spread-eagled to some tent stakes. He wrote on Mizuki's face: Greedy! Overconfident! Moron! He did it in bright yellow permanent marker. And it was good.

Iruka almost forgot to pull the shuriken out of his shoulder, he felt so awesome. But he did, and bandaged it up good and proper. It had not even done that much damage. He had not needed to one-arm that suplex - but sometimes, a guy had to show off even without an audience. Sometimes, it was just better to have big muscles. On a less manly man, Mizuki's girly attack would have scraped bone, or cut tendons.

"Time for a post-fight smoke." He pulled one from a battered tin box on his breast-pocket and lit it with a seal and a little flash of fire from his fingertips.

He took to the trees and it felt like flying as he flung himself fifty feet, sixty feet, a hundred feet from branch to branch, in dangerously long jumps, bleached-blond hair whipping back from his face, laughing around the cig in his mouth, hoping that someone else would be foolhardy enough to mess with him. He was not all the way there yet, but he was on his way, he was living the dream, he was alive and invincible and did not give a shit!

Sugi evergreens slid by his vision as he dove through the air almost recklessly. Occasionally he would stretch out a hand or foot and with just the slightest application of chakra, tear long strips of red-brown bark away from the trunks as he changed direction in mid-jump with a skidding secondary jump off of another tree. Sometimes, he would drop below the level of the tall hundred to two-hundred foot sugi down to the occasional oak trees, and as he catapulted himself ever forward through branches and twigs, twisting his body back up in great leaps to the taller trees once more, the downy oak leaves brushed along the backs of his hands as they left them behind. On the way back up, sometimes he had to change direction to avoid the whorled branches of spruce trees, which would not take his weight at this speed. There were beech trees too, ninety feet tall and much better for leaping along and climbing - the gray-white bark was not harsh on the fingers and the wood stood up well for bouncing off of. There were hinoki cypress and spruces and firs.

And occasionally, there would be gigantic mutants that typified the Forest of Death. Redwoods a thousand feet tall, surrounded by lesser oaks that were still far, far larger than they should have been, reaching hundreds of feet in height. These mountainous trees were disorienting, and while Iruka loved to climb them... now was not the time. He might get lost going from branch to branch and jump out not realizing he was eight hundred feet in the air and the next tree in sight some mundane fir six hundred feet below.

He startled a giant hawk with a wingspan of forty feet.

The bird had just snagged a normal boar, which weighed several hundred pounds but was vanishingly small in those huge claws. It was so agitated by Iruka's sudden appearance that it dropped its snack.

"Oh boy."

It's shriek echoed through the forest. He considered dropping down to the ground and hiding to avoid its massive talons and that beak that could easily snap him into bits, but then considered just how much time he'd spent dicking around on the outskirts of the Forest of Death while Izumo and Kotetsu had gone straight in towards the tower in the center.

Right. Now was as good a chance as any to travel in style.

As the hawk dove through the branches after him, simply smashing through the tiny branches of lesser trees and only avoiding the main trunks of the largest of them, Iruka tossed out a line, hooked a cypress around the trunk and changed his trajectory with a wrench that almost dislocated his shoulder. It was worth it. His body was thrown about in a tight arc and he simply grinned as he found himself crouching low on the outraged bird's back, sticking to it with chakra.

"Now, now, you stupid bird, time to give you a bit of direction."

Some fire-breathing techniques forceful enough to fight the wind darting out to the left or to the right of the giant's head sufficed to control yaw, and strong, chakra-powered yanks and shoves on the giant skull to pitch them up and down, and he was in the pilot's seat.

They blasted out over the canopy and Iruka laughed at the trees whizzing by below. He saw other ninja down there, gawking at the sight of the great shadow in the sky. If he did not die trying to get off the furious thing, he would get to the tower in record time, mere minutes.

How far away was that helpless little brat he had been before? He would never be able to thank his sensei, his best friend, enough, for setting him on his path to becoming GREAT NINJA ONIZUKA.


	2. On the way to the Titty Bar

He was just walking the usual way. It was down the street. He could never remember the real name of the street, but he thought of it as Red Light Road.

It was a broad road, forty feet wide, cobblestones. At the West end of the street: the tall, white buildings of the best civilian school in Konoha, Seirin Gakuen, and the connecting Sun Road (which he did remember the name of) around which were situated in orderly fashion: amenities, shops and restaurants. Not far from that lay a handful of the smaller Buddhist and Shinto shrines, with their white gates and graceful, peaked rooftops. At the other end of Red Light Road: the cabarets, hostess bars, and love hotels, all gleaming glass and neon lights and the whispy skirts flaring about the legs of girls girls girls.

He spent just about ninety percent of his time either at one end of Red Light Road or at the other, or in between.

Today had been another long day.

People were still so busy rebuilding after the Kyuubi attack that most families were not sending their kids to the schools, whether civilian or ninja. So of course, neither did the kids show up at his Dojo.

"Damn it! What the shit! After what I did for this town... where the hell are all the babes! Why aren't they signing up for classes at my Dojo?"

Around him, both civilians and ninja backed away nervously.

They all knew who he was now. Before the Kyuubi, he was just another civilian running a martial arts school where the civilians who did not have the pull to get their kids into Ninja Academy sent the troublesome brats instead.

Now he was famous. Well, he was supposed to be famous. But from the way people eyed him with a mixture of awe and fear (and far too much of that being fear), maybe, he had become infamous.

He paused before a sex toy store, looking in the window. Maybe he could pick up some porn? Then he'd just turn around, go back to his empty apartment and jack off between beers. Screw that. He kept going down the street, mournfully pondering whether or not he would need to move to another village.

"Damn it. I like this place," he sighed.

"No, enough of that, Onizuka! You are on your way to the most fabulous place in the world! A place with beer and real women jiggling about in wondrous thongs and high heels and nothing else! Hang in there Onizuka!" he belted out to the heavens, shaking his fists.

Let the people around him shy away and whatever. The important people in the Village knew who he was, and from them, at least, he had respect.

He had been there for a long time now, longer than his youthful appearance suggested.

But he'd never felt so old before. The Yondaime was dead. He had been a good friend. The nudie bar he was going to was one where they had often toasted to that dashing kid's dreams for the future of Konoha.

Only the Yondaime could look so noble talking about something even as he slipped money into a woman's g-string, her bobbing breasts inches from his blue eyes.

Enough! He tried to lose himself in thoughts of the lovely Yuuhi Tomoko. Oooooh yeah. That woman's body was far too lovely to die in ninja combat. It would have been a tremendous loss for mankind if she had died before she retired as a chuunin and decided to take up the lovely craft of erotic dance. Mmm... those jutting berry-red nipples always made him lose his head.

She would go out with him one day! Absolutely!

"Now what have we here?"

A fight in an alley. Just kids beating another kid. It happened all the time, in every age.

He was just going to ignore the whole scene when he paused, listening in.

The one being beaten was yelling something about becoming a ninja, now that his parents were gone. Because he wanted to become strong enough to protect other people's parents.

Really, who talked about crap like that while being mauled?

Again, his feet inched forward into a step that would take him beyond the narrow entrance to the shadowy little in-between space common to big cities. It wasn't his business. He wasn't a cop...

"I'm a Hyuuga and I couldn't make it in the Ninja Academy! You're all talk, Umino! You're just garbage."

"...G-guh... Ptah..."

That sounded like a bloody tooth being spat out, pinging off the steel exterior of a dumpster.

"One day... going to be strong enough... to protect even assholes... like you... who need to ask a girl to help them beat up somebody..."

"Gyaaah! Damn it! Shit!"

More beating sounds. Like meat being tenderized. It made him feel downright nostalgic.

"That's what you get for biting me, commoner!"

So he waited by the alley.

The prissy Hyuuga brat... man, whenever he saw those robes, he still felt the urge to kick dirt onto them... walked by, huffing as he straightened out his over-sized sleeves, one hand clasped tightly around his wrist. Another Hyuuga followed him, a girl. Older. She had the look of ninja all over her. She was surely the one that had beat down their quarry before the other could safely get his amateurish kicks and such in. Also, she already had that look of bitter resignation that all the Branch House members possessed.

So young, and she was already hiding the seal behind a headband.

The little brat tried to stare him down! She had balls, at least. Well, until those perfectly pale eyes widened in recognition.

"Oh... s-sorry!" the precious little thing stuttered, "Um. Excuse us, sir."

He smiled, and allowed just a hint of killing intent to gleam out of his eyes. A faint breeze appeared out of nowhere under the dead heat of a sun that was too bright on a hot day, and stirred the pale blond bangs away from his face.

"Hitomi? What's the big deal about - "

"Don't you know who that is?" she hissed, pulling the other Hyuuga after her. "I'm doing this for your protection you Main House idiot..." They were nearly running by then.

At last, the third kid shuffled out of the shadows. He was missing a tooth, he had bruises on his cheek and jaw and a lot more on his arms, defensive bruises from trying to block kicks after being knocked down.

"Yeah, what do you want, mister?" the kid spat. Red-tinged saliva trickled down his chin from his mouth. His black uniform was a mess, torn up at the knees. The coat sleeves were coming off. But the patch on the jacket breast was still quite visible.

"You go to Seirin, don't you?"

Good times at that place. Good times. How many years had it been anyway?

"Not anymore. I'm quitting. I'm not going to grow up a civilian doing some boring job while ninja like the Yondaime protect everybody. I'm going to be a ninja!"

"Psh. Ninja aren't all that."

Those little eyes glared through the swelling lids. The little guy bit his lip and bent his head and shoved his hands in his pockets and walked forward.

"You got any relatives you staying with?"

"What do you care?"

"I asked, didn't I?"

"I'm going to be moved to the orphanage soon. They say I can't just stay alone back... back home. But I know how to cook and I know how to clean. I'll be fine. But grown-ups don't care what I want..." and then the boy was leaning against the brick wall, trembling as the adrenaline wore off and the pain started to really make itself felt.

"Hrmm."

Steely fingers clamped around the little jaw, raising the face. He enjoyed the outrage in the eyes. Yes, such fine eyes. There was strength in there, and plenty of spirit.

"You know, they don't just let civilian kids with no ninja ancestry study at the Academy. Especially not when they're your age. You're already too old. Makes learning how to manipulate chakra hard."

Grubby little hands smacked his hand away.

"I'll just make them see! I can do it!"

"But if a citizen with a reputation sponsors you, you can make it in."

That got his attention. Then the little eyes looked up to his face, really looked at his face. Here it comes...

"Who are you anyway, Mister? Why do you give a shit?"

And then he was laughing. Delighted.

"You're hired, boy. I like your eyes."

"Hey... Hey, put me down!"

What had his parents been feeding him? The kid was as heavy as a paperweight. Carrying him by the back of his shirt was easier than carrying his beer after a grocery run. Hmm, beeeeeer. If he trained this kid, the brat could be the one to clean the dojo... and his apartment... and cook... and buy his beer!

"First, Umino - "

"Iruka, my name is Iruka! Hey, help! Somebody! I'm being kidnapped!"

"Iruka, my name is Onizuka Eikichi. See the way everybody around us is just pretending they don't see anything? That's coz now that the Yondaime is dead, I am the strongest person in this village. And I'm not even a ninja. So what the hell can anyone do if I feel like hiring child labor? Not a damn thing."

It was true. A few looked at them in puzzlement, but mostly, they just walked along a little faster, or did their best to keep their eyes from falling on the pair.

Iruka flailed his limbs in total futility.

"Hey! Get this crazy bastard off me!"

"Yeah, yeah, yell all you want. Hmm. First, we pick up some beer. And porn. Then you're going to start learning your new job. I love the swearing, by the way. Did your parents have any idea you know all those words?"

"What the fuck? I'm nine! I don't want a job! I gotta go to..."

"If you'd shut up, you might even hear me tell you that as part of your new job, I will be training you personally. And you're going to show those stuck-up ninja bastards at the Academy just what a student of mine can do! Oh yeah!" He cackled like a maniac. "Hehe. The Sandaime always did want me to settle down. Adopting you should make him feel like I give a crap 'bout what he says."

"Heeeeelp!"


	3. Starting Over

Trudging on the way home, Onizuka Iruka (he had actually discovered the name change when the Academy administrative staff interrupted his lunch to have some additional forms signed just that day) was tired, bruised all over, and happy.

He was still getting beaten everyday. But each time, he managed to use a little more of what he was learning from the Dojo. Each time, he did just a bit more damage to those privileged ninja-babies.

Eikichi... Was he sensei, pal, brother or father to him? Technically, the man was his foster-father.

While they were both in the Dojo under the apartment they shared, Iruka was both his student and assistant. A lot of the older kids and the adults looked rather ticked at him when Eikichi wasn't looking. Eikichi had put him right in the middle of the advanced classes even if Iruka had no idea what the names of the moves were, let alone how to string them together into a meaningful sequence.

Well, at first anyway, during the initial month when he had felt like all he was really useful for was mopping up the wooden floors and dusting off the endless shelves of trophies and medals and picture frames of guys who must have been Eikichi's ancestors or something. But as the weeks had gone by and he kept getting up after the other students would kick his butt, maybe those looks changed, and then sometimes it wasn't just Eikichi correcting his form or giving him pointers, but the other guys (and girls) too.

And then after Dojo hours, Eikichi wasn't sensei anymore and would refuse to hear a word if it had anything to do with extra training or how to fight.

But Iruka was pretty sure your foster father didn't compare notes with you regarding who was the hottest babe on TV and whether or not he would be able to score a date that week. Your foster father wasn't supposed to bet on things with you or make stupid dares to try to get you to come out of what he thought was your shell but which you knew was a necessary defense against a harsh world.

He'd willingly talk (too willingly, actually) about girls and beer and movies and TV shows, and about how Iruka's day was at Ninja Academy before Dojo hours started. They'd talk about a million things.

"Oh shit, Bro. Don't tell me that story again..."

"Let me tell you, the first time I got a venereal - "

"I can't hear you! Lalalala! I'm not hearing this! Damn it that's really too much information!"

"-which is why, absolutely, when you start getting your mojo on, you gotta stay PROTECTED, yesirree!"

But sometimes, very rarely really, when Iruka screwed something up in a moral sense, like the one time he'd gotten caught taking cash from the Dojo's vault, Eikichi's whole demeanor would transform. The set of those mighty shoulders changed, and he looked much more serious, and a little sad. That really loud voice would get really quiet and infinitely more scary.

Definitely not just a friend or brother.

He got up to the simple-looking three-story building and frowned at the chains on the handles of the huge wooden double-doors. Why was the Dojo closed already? Usually, classes went up to just an hour before dinner. Eikichi's personal gym on the second floor was closed too, from the lack of lights behind the big glass windows.

Iruka cautiously stalked his way up the side-staircase at the back of the building.

Sometimes, his guardian got the urge to test Iruka's 'ninja-ing skillz' by randomly attacking him and seeing how many seconds he could last before Eikichi could drop him.

Finally, he got up to the third floor and held his breath as he put in the keys for the upper barrel bolt and the door knob lock and quietly twisted.

Opening the door a crack, he heard Eikichi's loud, almost hysterical giggling, and a woman's voice too, and Iruka relaxed.

"Hey, hey! Mister Employee is back!"

Damn it, why did he have to call him that though? The guy would not call him by name unless he was going to beat him for fucking something up.

"Um. Hi."

Iruka felt the burn creep down from his cheeks all the way past his neck. Wow. No wonder the Dojo was closed.

"Why hello there! Oni-kun... you never mentioned how cute this little guy was!"

She bent down to him and Iruka could tell she was just holding back from pinching his cheeks, which he would normally hate, seeing as he was already ten and totally nothing like a baby at all and even held down an actual job while his classmates were goofing off at video arcades and whatever, but holy shit, he would not have minded if this woman spent a few extra moments just to tweak his cheeks a bit. That was some really, really magnificent cleavage in front of his eyes. The lady's light, floaty mini-dress was cut up top all the way down to her belly button.

And the scent... Her long, shimmery night-silk hair smelled like flowers, just a hint of it, overlaying the clean smell of girl-skin and heat.

"Hee hee, Tomoko-chan, I think you've broken him."

She patted him on the head instead, before turning and giving his Bro a thumbs-up. That split-second of her boobs bouncing just a bit side-ways and almost out of her top just about made his eyes cross, and then when she was standing and her side was to him, there was so, so, so much tanned leg going up. The slits on her red dress went all the way up to her armpits - the whole thing was just barely held closed by a series of fine gold chains that zig-zagged down her sides down to her hips.

Iruka knew that the other dudes in his class were a little behind on the whole girls situation. But living with Eikichi was an education on what was truly prime tawdry female flesh and the example in front of him today was... Okay, he really had to get a grip. But he couldn't wipe the embarassed grin off his face. Oh shit, and he hoped she didn't look down past his belt.

"Looks like a healthy young guy. Was worried you were just exploiting him, ya know."

"Hey, hey. He's put on twenty pounds since moving in with me. Honest work and plenty of food."

"I know. You're a good guy, Oni-kun. You always were my best tipper."

"Oh well, I mean... I knew you had a little girl to take care of, umm..."

That was enough to shake Iruka out of it. He had never seen his bro get just this side of bashful. He had seen him get the ultra-perverted look when he'd bring home a new stash of porn or when he'd see nice-looking women on the street. He had seen the devilish false-charm type face when Eikichi would do stuff like help a woman carrying something heavy or when his better-endowed female students asked for extra help with forms. This was different. He really liked this lady.

This was Tomoko. Not a week went by that the guy did not talk about her. So, she finally gave him a shot...

Iruka cleared his throat. "Uh, should I prepare something special for dinner, Bro? Before I, uh... yeah, before I go to that, you know, that sleep-over at, uh... Izumo's?"

"He's a sweet boy, Oni-kun. And very considerate."

She turned her face back to him and then Iruka positively felt steam coming out of his ears.

"I'll take care of the cooking tonight, okay? Don't worry. I'm not chasing you out of the apartment. And you have to stay to try my... dumplings." She grinned and that made her seem years younger.

Well, Iruka was treated to yet another view of her expanse of wonderfully creamy looking flesh as she was smiling next to his face, and it was overwhelming enough that he only sort of caught the tail end of Eikichi making his 'Go AWAY now!" demon-face transitioning into that angelic 'Who, what, me?" look as Tomoko straightened once more and grinned at the big lug before she started swaying her sexiness over to the kitchen.

"Uh. Right. Well... I'll just... be over... in my room. Yeah."

Oh my gods. All of them. Each perfect sphere of her butt twitched mesmerizingly under the chiffon as she walked away. Shit, there was definitely one aspect in which Eikichi totally flunked as a parental figure - he had turned Iruka into a horny teenager before he even really started puberty.

Iruka escaped, face burning. He fell into bed and put a pillow over his face. Maybe if he smothered himself and died, his shame would be forgotten. He was sure she had noticed his hard-on and was extra-mortified when he heard her talking about maybe bringing her daughter by so they could be friends. Oh boy. He wished the walls in Eikichi's flat weren't so thin.

Because while he detected instinctively that she was totally into Eikichi, the thought of a younger version of her that at first he could totally lust over but who could very well become his step-sister... Oy!

He started banging his head into his pillows. Damn Eikichi and those hentai doujin! How was he going to concentrate on studying for tomorrow's stupid ass history exam like this? Why the hell did ninja kiddies have to waste time on the same junk that they taught in the civilian school anyway! They might as well just have all the kids go to civilian schools and send them to ninja extracurriculars afterwards!

And, oh yeah, at dinner, he would totally talk about finally getting a hit in on that Hitomi bitch. She still beat him, but he had been getting closer and closer to landing one on her and today had been the day. Tomoko was a ninja before, she'd probably appreciate it too.

...Thinking about school was not helping at all, and he was still hyper-ventilating some at the brief flash of what could very well have been just a hint of pink when she'd bent low that second time.

Okay, Iruka had to admit that in addition to becoming a kick-ass ninja, he now had a new goal in life.

Absolutely. He had to land a girl as hot as that. That was just how things had to be.


	4. Battle Anko

People were looking at him like he was an idiot and in the middle of the arena some generic jounin in totally boring old-school all-black ninja-wear complete with split-toe black booties and mask and hood was giving him the evil eye.

Izumo shoved him hard, hissing, "Iruka! It's you and the psycho-chick! Hello, idiot! Third part of the chuunin exam!"

Oh, right.

Iruka waved at the crowd, hopped up to the rail, jumped down to the fighting ground.

He wasn't really listening to the jounin's short speech about yielding or fights being stopped or killing being allowed but unnecessary killing being frowned upon.

Onizuka Iruka was still day-dreaming about the first time he'd seen Yuhi Tomoko's fabulous body. If only her daughter Kurenai wasn't such a butch girl, hiding her figure in baggy clothes as some kind of feminist rebellion against her totally super-feminine mother... On the other hand, good thing she didn't dress like her mother or Iruka would just have to hit on her and that would make things really, really awkward if Eikichi ever married Tomoko.

"Now, fight!"

While he was still kinda fuzzy and lost in memories, he was just fast enough that he did not get caught by the sudden violent attempts of his opponent to castrate him. He side-stepped, he twirled, he dodged kunai and slapped kicks aside and redirected punches away, and finally, after a particularly brutal exchange of close-in teai attacks and elbows, he tied up his foe's arms in a complicated lock, and she was snarling and spitting in his face, he finally, finally managed to shake his thoughts free from the glorious, hazy thoughts of those lovely thimbles poking through the light material of that amazing dress with the so-deep décolletage and the so-high slits up the sides and the little chains that made such little sounds when she moved.

"Oh, Flat-Chest! I'm fighting you?"

"Anko! My name is Anko, you asshole!"

She wrenched her arms loose and powered a knee towards his crotch.

He stopped it with a heavy-handed shoda that left a big palm-shaped bruise on her thigh, and hopped back, smiling. A man of normal strength could not stop a knee strike with a single hand, but Iruka was now Eikichi's heir, and the secret principles allowed for some very showy displays of sheer muscle power. No chakra needed at all, just power.

"Don't take it so personal, sheesh."

Now Anko, he really liked Anko. Ever since he'd given her that nickname when they were eleven, she had gone crazy trying to one-up him and, in the process, all that training had given her a pretty nice figure which she showed off with totally skimpy clothes. Nice muscles on her arms, not like the sticks on the wussy girly girls, strong hips and calves, a hard belly, and the pecs she got from doing all those push-ups lifted her boobs (which had finally started to grow in) out and up.

"In fact," he gently redirected an elbow that would have pulped his nose using a circular motion that dissipated the force, "your boobs are well on their way to being almost hot."

She screamed and tried a reverse cut with a knife she'd produced in her left hand. It would have gutted him like a fish, instead it cut his t-shirt open from sternum to belly.

"I SO hate you Onizuka!"

She front-kicked him then and so, hey, he front-kicked her too, and having longer legs, his kick was the one that landed, propelling her backwards.

Anko was way tougher than a pansy-ass like Mizuki though - she didn't even lose a beat as the breath exploded out of her from her abdomen being compressed by the impact of his boot.

Then with the fireballs. Oh, fireballs. Those hurt if they hit. Didn't matter how much muscle you had - fire burned.

He was dancing around them and the explosions from her explosive notes and the wires that were tied to her kunai that she was throwing everywhere and then there were the clouds of poisonous gases from packets of powders and stuff that she was igniting and spreading all over the place. The battlefield was getting really, really hazardous.

He supposed that he teased her a little too much. But she had just been too cute. She'd been all insecure and quiet once and look what he'd done for her! Some teasing and along the way she'd turned out extroverted, tough, violent and deadly sexy and sexily deadly! She'd grown out her short boy's cut into long dark hotness, wore low cut hot pants that showed off the top of her thongs and halter-tops that took a lot of skill to move in without losing during vigorous high-speed combat.

Iruka was downright proud of her. Just like him, Anko had come a long way.

Now, thousands of people up in the stands were watching them. Misfits, kids who had not had the benefit of ninja parentage.

He could hear them cheering and clapping and yelling.

They paused thirty feet apart, craters and gaseous clouds around and in between them. She was panting by then, and, keeping those blazing eyes on him, her fingers swept along her weapons-pouches, ticking off how many various implements of death she still had left.

Iruka ripped off what was left of his coat and shirt. What was it with the clothes destruction today? He had yet to see any kunoichi getting their clothes chopped or blasted off of them during either the second test or the first couple of matches. Heee hee. The day was young though. Nobody talked about it, but all the guys knew that half the reason so many civilians attended this part of the exam was the possibility of seeing half-naked ninja hotness.

He liked to imagine that he heard some girls gasping at the sight of his perfectly carved abs and square chest and his totally cut arms. Or... wait. Was that Anko?

"Look, I promise, I'll stop calling you that."

"Too late you, you total jerk-face! You've so gotta die!"

"Will you go out with me after this?"

She was spluttering and red and he was sure, utterly furious. And so, so cute.

Then she dropped the wrist weights and ankle weights and holy shit, when had she started with that little trick?

The audience gasped when she disappeared, and he was sure he did not imagine hearing that.

She was now moving faster than the civilians and about half of the ninja audience could see. Thunderous footsteps approaching from all directions. She was cutting at him and punching and kicking and trying all kinds of nasty tricks... well the same nasty tricks as before, but at double-speed.

"I really have to get Bro to talk to that Gai person," Iruka muttered as he pushed his own body harder and harder to defend against that relentless assault. He glowed with the effort as he flipped the switch in his mind and changed his breathing patterns to unleash his full physical potential.

That trick with the weights was just not healthy, putting such tremendous strain on the extremities of growing teens. It put stress on the joints and messed with your center of gravity, and you were never quite comfortable without the weights on because you spent so much time training with them on. There was a real risk of injuring yourself using that training method.

And it just was not necessary for real speed.

Of course, Iruka had the advantage of the secret principles of Eikichi's martial arts - tricks his Bro taught only to his very small inner circle of favored students. Heh, what a hoot it would be if some poor ninja shmuck made the mistake of picking on one of the five civilians in Konoha that were stronger and faster than nine-tenths of its jounin.

Anko was at about the limit of strength and speed a human could reach without opening the Celestial Gates or knowing the secret technique of Tenryu Kokyu Ho, reserved only for the few Bro considered worthy.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it!" Anko was yelling as she tried alternating kicks to the body flowing into knees to the legs and then a short uppercut with the left followed by an elbow swinging in from the right. She could not find the range.

Every time she was sure she moved just close enough and all those successive high speed strikes missed or were gently pushed off-line and made to miss. Iruka would just subtly alter the distance between them faster than she could, getting just a bit too far out so a blow would come up short or coming in just slightly too close, robbing her attacks of the power of full extension and making it easier for him to stop them.

"Why can't I fucking hit you!"

Okay, now Iruka felt a bit bad. She had really pushed herself and he was maybe laying it on too thick. It must have been hell acquiring this kind of speed using the dumb-ass methods of that Gai moron. Day after day of training, pain that no one saw, and then at night when she finally took the weights off to give the body time to recover, sore muscles and worse, over-used chakra pathways from all the pushing it took just to keep her body moving normally with such drastic weight on it. He didn't want her to be discouraged... and he really didn't want to make her look inadequate. Big Bro would not approve.

A palm thrust to his chest made his ribs creak and then he was bouncing and rolling along the ground, propelled backwards fifty feet. There was thunder at the impact. His back left a permanent impression on the wall enclosing the fighting ground.

"Ouch."

He pulled himself out of the cracked concrete.

Anko was frowning and looking down at her hand. Right, she could tell that he'd let her hit him. Shit, now she'd be really upset. Sometimes, there was just no winning.

He pondered what the quickest way to end it would be. Without embarrassing her or hurting her too much.

Then he let out a breath as she raised her hand.

"I concede, examiner. I'm... I'm out of chakra. And out of bombs. And poison. And everything," and she sighed, head drooping as the audience clapped and they announced his victory.

Iruka walked up to her and raised her fist with his hand and they cheered louder.

"Don't look down, Flat-Chest. Be proud. You did great. They're going to make you chuunin."

"You really going to go on a date with me, Iruka? I bite."

But she did look up and the fire was back in her eyes. She brought her shoulders back and thrust her chest out and hoooo boy had she ever grown out of that nickname he'd inflicted on her.

He smiled.

"Lemme just take care of business in the next round. Then. Well, there's this dumpling place. Okay?"

She slugged him a really good one that left him bent over and coughing and gasping.

"Ask me again if you win it all, asswipe."

But she was smiling.

Oh shit... She wasn't supposed to say that. She was supposed to hate his guts. Was this a good way to begin a relationship? What if it was just lust and adrenaline? What if she didn't really like him? He'd better remember to have a talk with Bro about this some time during the one month training period before the last round.

Izumo and Kotetsu looked both a bit disgusted and a lot amused when he trudged back up to the participants' seating area. They hadn't made it past the preliminaries, but got to sit there because of their respective families' pull.

"Dude, I don't know if we're supposed to high-five you or console you or what. She has quite the rep, you know."

Well... of course, that was his fault too, Iruka acknowledged internally.

Then a shadow loomed over him, and a hand smacked him on the back with about twice the force that Anko had hit him with, leaving Iruka crumpled on the concrete and feeling demolished and breathless. The steel railing he had bounced off of was bent alarmingly now. And damn it... he couldn't breathe!

His bro was there in one of his typical white ensembles complete with blazer over the blue polo shirt and the red tie, and grinning like a madman.

"Mr. Employee! You got a date with such a hot chick! How come you never bring her by these days, huh?"

...Okay, maybe bro wasn't the best person to talk to about it. Iruka hoped he'd remember to ask Tomoko about it next time there was the opportunity, but he still got a bit stupid when she was around. How is it some women just got hotter as they got older?

Girls were such a mystery. Hopefully he'd be able to start breathing again so he wouldn't die embarrassingly from a congratulatory pat on the back and never have the chance to delve into the great mystery...


	5. Training

This was the life.

Hot water around his flesh. So hot it seeped into his tired old bones.

"Err... Bro... Sensei. I thought we were going to train?"

Eikichi cracked one eye open.

"You want to train, just peep at the hot women on the other side. The resulting training will be beyond compare - believe it!"

"I've got to fight a Hyuuga in just a few weeks!"

The dumb kid. Hadn't he looked in a mirror lately? He was already taller than most of the guys his age - he would end up taller than Eikichi himself. His body was not yet so heavily muscled, it was more wiry and still on the lean side, but he was definitely beefier than any non-Akimichi of his age, and without the thick layer of fat. Did he not see himself when he performed the techniques of their arts? He did them with the same crisp, fluid economy of motion that Eikichi himself could only manage with total focus.

"Mr. Employee, if you're so worried about those degenerate posers, I will permit you to use the Fist in the last matches."

Haha, the look on the boy's face!

"Did you really think one month of training would make any difference? You're not some ninjutsu genius who can pick up some crazy technique in a few weeks. You're a down and dirty taijutsu guy. We'll keep up your high level of physical conditioning, but you're not going to improve your hand-to-hand skills in this limited time. Anyway, you already know, down to your bones, techniques that could destroy everything."

"I... thought I wasn't supposed to use them unless it was life and death."

"You don't think the Hyuuga won't be trying to kill you? You're my heir. They have something to prove over our Arts. And in the finals, you are most likely to face an Uchiha. Their whole clan would like nothing better than to force you to use the Fist in the hope that your opponent, and all the Uchiha in the audience, can copy it."

The brat looked pale. An amazing feat in a hot spring. Well. It sounded like he would be put to the test for real in the last two fights. A test of two of Eikichi's assumptions about the Fist. That it was a higher art than the Jyuuken, and that it was impossible to copy.

"I... don't want to kill her."

"Are you stupid, Mr. Employee? Our Art is not just for killing. There are seven hundred and eight Keiraku Hikou that you know. There are more ways to use them than just for blood. So beat her without dealing death. And whoever you face in the final too. Now, quit thinking about it so much and relax. I don't want my student to look nervous when those old fucktards come."

"Wait, what?"

And then Mr. Employee stiffened as two figures approached them through the hot mist.

Here they were. Mr. Snakey, with his too-cold face and his bloodthirsty eyes. Mr. Froggy, who could never get over not being as good as his old team-mate.

"Yo! So, here we are, three old farts in a hot spring. You guys ready to start peeping?"

"Please, Onizuka-san. I don't peep," huffed Mr. Snakey.

And of course, Mr. Froggy raised both fists into the air and exclaimed "Absolutely! Do you know, Tsunade-chan is right on the opposite side of the freaking fence! The best boobs on the continent!"

"These two, Mr. Employee, are currently two of the three strongest ninja in Konoha."

"You flatter us. Tsunade would take issue with that, or do you mean..."

Eikichi leaned back and rested his head on the smooth stones lining the spring.

"Sandaime's not the same man he was. Losing the Yondaime took his heart out of him. Any of you three could beat him now."

Mr. Froggy looked incensed at that.

"He's as strong as he ever was!"

"Quiet down, Mr. Froggy, I didn't invite you here for an argument. I wanted to hang out with you for now, and then later in the evening, we'll pick up Tsunade and the four of us old-timers can get my student here properly drunk. He's nervous, you see, 'bout facing one or two of the 'best' clans of Konoha."

Mr. Froggy grinned and gave Mr. Employee a thumbs-up.

"Don't worry about it kid. Most of Konoha has only heard rumors about what your sensei's fighting arts can do. We've seen it. You'll win. Just... try not to kill 'em. They're Konoha shinobi, just like you. And damn it, Onizuka," he turned back to Eikichi, "they're not frogs."

Mr. Snakey chuckled. It was a cold and lifeless sound.

"If you don't fight to kill, gaki, they'll kill you. Don't let these sentimental fools convince you to hold back. The Hyuuga and Uchiha are the top clans for good reason."

Eikichi tuned out the brief argument that ensued. Those two always took opposite positions just out of habit. They'd fight over different kinds of sake when it came time for the drinking, over which restaurant had the best food...

They settled in and he saw that, despite themselves, they were loosening up. The heat did that. And the cool mountain air. The scent of pine trees around the spring. From farther away, if he focused his senses, he could smell spiced meat sizzling on a grill. If he focused them closer, he could smell the lovely scent of women on the other side of the fence.

"I am most impressed with your student, Onizuka-san."

"Why, thank you, Mr. Snakey."

How he loved that slight twitch at the corner of the eye. Well, loved being the cause of it - not loved it. He wasn't into that.

"My student would have beat yours," Mr. Froggy complained. "Damn, I miss the boy."

"Hey, I resent that, I can beat any - "

"Shut it, Mr. Employee. He's right - for the moment. At his peak, Mr. Froggy's student was really something, he could match me for quite a while before he'd tire out. In about ten or maybe fifteen more years though, Mr. Employee, you'll be stronger than I was at my best, the strongest Fist thus far."

That shut everybody up, and Eikichi grinned as Mr. Employee sank into the water until just his nose was out of the water, embarrassed, blushing quite bright.

"Mr. Snakey, you should really try taking up a student too. You're the last one of the Legendary Three not to take one."

"Perhaps. That girl your student defeated today... she'd have beaten any of the other candidates. She is interesting."

Mr. Froggy was aghast, and was pounding his fists into the water, splashing all of them.

"No way! Why are you encouraging this elitist psycho to take an apprentice? He'll ruin her!"

"You're just jealous you haven't found anyone yet to replace your former student."

The hostility rose so quickly. Eikichi loved it.

"You know, the two of you, and Tsunade... I did think about teaching you."

"What? But... why didn't you?"

He did not answer, only smiled. Before the Kyuubi came, the three of them had not known who the hell he was, just considering him another wannabe martial artist civilian. Afterwards... There was something off about them, really. They had so much talent and ability, but were proven too unstable. Mr. Froggy did not have the focus. Mr. Snakey had the focus, but not the heart. Ms. Mountains had focus and heart, but not the will.

"Peeping time. Let's make a wager on who can peep longest before getting caught. We take turns."

"I would never indulge in such worthless..."

"I'll give the winner a scroll about the other half of my techniques. An incomplete scroll, of course, but surely such brilliant ninja as yourselves could improvise quite a lot based on that knowledge. But... since I am surely going to win, there's not much chance of that scroll getting into your hands, eh?"

Ah, hehehe. Finally! After a decade of trying, he was going to get Mr. Snakey to peep at women in a hot spring.

His own successor was progressing quite well. It had been a good choice, making him heir to his true techniques. The chuunin exam was in the bag. The future was bright. Life was good.

"Nipples, nipples, so pink, so hard! Nipples! A fine belly, rippling and lovely! Shining droplets by moonlight, caught in tight, curling hairs! Hee hee, your turn, Mr. Employee, sing something dirty! And then: the peeping!"

What Mr. Employee was missing was a sense of teamwork, and the value of camraderie. The other two guys on his team were just too average. They were one-trick guys and did not have the strength to make themselves more... and they let Mr. Employee take the lead too much. He needed to see how the kid did at the higher levels of being a ninja, to see if his heart was true. If it was, if he stayed just gentle enough despite the killing that would harden him, then Eikichi would test him one last time, and if he passed, then Eikichi could finally rest...

And if not, he would sigh, seal away the Fist from Iruka's memories, and look for another successor.


	6. Battle Superiority

The day of the semifinal arrived.

Earlier that morning, Uchiha Ryota had demolished his opponent, a tool-specialist whose name totally escaped Iruka. Some older guy with glasses and a rocking beard.

Too bad, that beard rocked so hard, he should have won just on the basis of the beard. It was just wrong that the Uchiha had seared it off with a fireball.

Afterwards, it was his turn.

"So. You going to open with the usual, 'I'm superior, I'm Hyuuga, I'm badass, more badass than anyone else could ever be, etc. etc.' and so forth?"

She shook her head.

Actually, she'd changed a lot since that day four years before. She was taller, her hair was chopped short like a boy's, and rather than the robes, wore a simple white t-shirt and snug jeans and white sneakers trimmed in blue. She looked softer too, not a stick with muscle like a boy, more womanly. Curvy.

And she did not hide the caged-bird-seal.

"I've gotten over being in the branch family," she sighed. "Lots of us never do. I'm... sorry about when you were young. That main family brat would activate the seal for any excuse."

"It's cool, it's cool. I know. What happened to the brat?"

She smiled viciously.

"He got dropped into the Branch Family. He failed his diplomatic training. His parents couldn't save him anymore, too many failures, too many offenses. Now he's learning about the other side."

Huh. What a world.

"Hitomi, right? You got cuter."

"You too."

The crowd above them was growing restless. They wanted some fighting. Or at least the pre-fight trash-talking.

"I guess we should start."

Hitomi sighed again.

"They'll hit me with the seal if I just concede. So I'll fight as hard as I can."

"It's all good," he grinned at her. Was she blushing?

Then her eyes popped wider and crazy-like and the pulsing veins showed up around them on her cheeks and brow, and she slid into her stance, palms open, one low, one high, feet a little more than shoulder width apart.

Man, why did she have to turn out nice?

She might kill him if he held back, but it was just tough for him to resolve the need to use deadly force against a cute girl who didn't want to hurt him either. He'd go for option two. Bro hated the idea. It was a gamble, one they were not absolutely sure would work. And unnecessary - he could simply overpower her if he was not worried about humiliating her.

It was odd to still be finding out new things about Bro. He was against unnecessarily revealing the Fist... but once he decided that its use was warranted, he tossed restraint out the window.

"I was going to do this for real, but you're too nice. Imitation Art of Dragon's Breathing: Art of the Lungfish Gasping!"

Iruka dropped into a crouch, knees bent to ninety degrees, fists at his waist, and belted out a big yell. Energy burst into life around him, a dense light that was almost blindingly intense to his Hyuuga opponent, and any Hyuuga watching.

"Wh... what is that? It's not chakra!"

His muscles bulged and his shirt split open, ripping down the seams as his chest and arms seemed to get a third again larger. Then there was a blur, an explosion of movement...

From somewhere above them, Iruka heard his bro clap a hand to his face in frustration.

Iruka's image steadied. His whole upper body seemed to be covered with veins that popped out full of blood, on his pecs, on his biceps and triceps and the backs of his forearms and up his neck and on his face. And on his chest, round scar marks in the configuration of the constellation of the Great Bear stood out like a fiery beacon.

Hitomi blinked once, twice. She had to ask it.

"Is that... is that magic marker?"

"It's the pulsing blood of furious rage!"

Yes, he had magic-markered the veins and the scars of the Big Dipper onto himself in a stunning display of speed and precision!

"...Uh. Ok. So, we're still fighting then?"

"Yes! Disdain it at your peril, Hyuuga! Now you face the most dangerous of opponents, one who can kill with a touch just like you!"

"...You're mocking me."

He stage-whispered to her, "No, not you. Just your clan."

Iruka could see them up there, those stiff asshats in their fancy robes quietly fuming in their seats while the rest of the audience around their section chuckling and laughing, jeering, cheering. The air in the arena thrummed with it.

"Um. Right. You're in my... uh. Field of Divination. Right."

She looked like she was expecting him to poof away into the remnants of a clone or with a kawarimi with each touch, but he just grinned and took it.

Above them, there were gasps.

Her feet slid from stance to stance, a solid base that helped her absorb the momentum of her high-speed arm motions. Strike after strike hit home. Just the lightest of touches, but with focused energy behind them. Some Hyuuga struck with added force, but that was foolish - it wasn't impact that delivered damage with the Jyuuken, so why waste the energy when speed was more important? It was executed perfectly, with tremendous speed and precision as the tenketsu were attacked in the distinct pattern refined by generations of Jyuuken masters. It was only when the last hits were landing that she noticed it. Something was wrong. This did not feel right at all. The points had not responded the way they were supposed to.

Afterwards, Hitomi backed away warily. He was still standing.

Conversationally, Iruka said, "There are many more points than the rudimentary understanding taught by your masters. I may look like a joke, but I know them all."

He lazily pressed a handful of points along his own chest and abdomen, and a dozen more on each arm, and a couple on his head, while she stepped further back, obviously confused and more than a little afraid as her all-seeing eyes saw less and less of his chakra network, which seemed to overflow with energy that looked so much... richer than normal chakra.

Partly, it was for show. In actuality, he was pushing his own Tsubo to undo the minimal damage she had managed to do to his inner coils.

"The Jyuuken is a pale imitation of the Fist of the..." Eurgh... it was just impossible to trash talk with the stupid name of the Fist! Who the hell would be afraid of the Fist of the Big Dipper? Yuck! He'd use its improper name, which sounded much cooler... "a pale imitation of the Fist of the North Star!" He bellowed that last bit out proudly.

Again, he thought he heard bro smack himself in the face in irritation.

Sorry bro, Iruka thought. At least if anyone tried to search for the ancient secrets because of this fight, they'd get confused, possibly researching an entirely different Art from Hokuto Shinken.

When he had done that little trick with the magic markers, he had sealed off the opening points himself, without impeding the flows of the deeper coils within, through which poured a torrent of Touki. The movements were also supposed to distract her from noticing the change in appearance as he had closed off the points. Without them to push through, most of her chakra just flared off into the air, unable to penetrate the Touki infusing his flesh.

He roared dramatically for the audience and looked up, relishing the look of alarm on the faces of the Hyuuga elders in the audience. They did not understand exactly what he had done, but their worst suspicions were confirmed. The Fist completely neutralized the one thing they were good at. He had defeated one of their very best offensive moves, and certainly the best move that a chuunin level Hyuuga could possibly know.

They still had other fancy moves, but their other best move at this level was defensive, and if she demonstrated it, he'd beat that too. Unlikely though, usually that was only taught to Main House Hyuuga.

The audience was deathly quiet now. They did not understand fully either, but they knew enough about the reputation of the Hyuuga to know that the half-naked muscle man in the fighting pit should not have been able to just shrug off that attack, with a smile and a cheeky wave.

"Hitomi, you better show that you're more than just a Hyuuga. Because if that's all you are, you lost before the fight even started," he said to her quietly.

So she pulled a kunai with each fist, rushed ahead at an angle, circling him, and started firing off shuriken and throwing daggers. Her eyes returned to normal.

Good. If she dropped the Jyuuken... he would stop using the Fist. That greatly increased the odds that he would not have to put the serious hurting on her.

Iruka batted away the projectiles with his bare hands, barely having to shift his feet. They both knew this fight was over. Without the Jyuuken, everything Hitomi could do was a lesser version of what Anko had attempted to do to him.

But he wanted her to show her spirit. For her own sake.

The Hyuuga would play off this loss as though it was just because she was a lowly branch member, but the true power movers of Konoha would know the truth. The Hyuuga's reputation had already taken a tremendous hit today, no matter how they tried to spin these events. And though no one would be able to recreate his techniques, the mere knowledge that it was possible to completely nullify the Jyuuken would cause others to experiment and try to develop other ways to beat it too. The Hyuuga were lucky that the political situation had been too tense for other Hidden Villages to have participated in this chuunin exam... or the failure of their famed fighting techniques would spread beyond Konoha's walls.

Hitomi did not want to prolong this. He sensed that. She was charging in, gambling it all on possibly getting a lucky knockout blow through. Because that was her best hope.

Iruka had to smile. Another Hyuuga would have just accepted the loss as destiny and given up, but she was gambling it all on a high risk move, and that made her worth respecting.

He was glad that he could hold the Fist back. He would defeat her cleanly, reserving the indignity inflicted by his new finishing move for his next opponent. Uchiha always deserved it, those stuck-up bastards.

Ten feet away. Five feet away and for a heartbeat, Hitomi paused, before her speed kicked up another notch. With every taijutsu move requiring the use of chakra, Hyuuga developed great stamina, capacity and control. Forsaking the apparently ineffective Jyuuken style for now, Hitomi could put all that energy into her muscles, boosting her speed and strength to levels few chuunin could manage.

A long, looping right hook whipped in towards Iruka's eye. His forearm flickered up and absorbed the impact, her fist just bouncing off the dense muscle over the bones.

She faked a leg kick towards the inside of Iruka's right leg, pumped her feet harder, kicking up dust with the increase in speed, trying to spin around him to deliver a knee at his ribs from behind.

He read it, turned and slid his left foot back to keep his base. With an open-handed palm to the hip from which she'd extended her knee-strike, he knocked her off-balance, and then she was hopping and skidding back as she desperately parried and blocked his simple, straightforward combinations of jabs, uppercuts and hooks. His greater reach was forcing her back and soon, she would run out of room to retreat.

The speed was impressive. But despite putting all her chakra into boosting her body, it was still less muscle performance than Anko had demonstrated. In addition, her lean arms did not have the meat on them needed to just absorb the punishment from his fists, no matter how much chakra she tried to force into them. The heavy blows jarred her to her bones - even when she blocked his punches, she felt the force of them traveling up her arms and into her spine. The extensor muscles on the posterior surface of her forearms were getting pummeled. Her arms would be totally black and blue after this.

The accumulating damage dropped her hand speed further.

She was good even without the Jyuuken and left no openings in her defenses, but Iruka was overpowering her, and made his own openings.

He hammered a knife-hand through a weakened block towards her belly, and smiled as it simply passed through. A simple clone combined with a substitution, but executed so quickly, just in that space between his hand pushing past her arms and the time his fingers would have hit her solar plexus, and with the barest minimum chakra expended so she could keep the rest going to speed.

With a side-step, he avoided double knife thrusts at his kidneys from behind. She recovered quickly, crouching down to duck under a side-kick that would have broken her jaw.

Then he was raining kicks at her head and torso and legs, kicks so fast she could only see the very beginning as he shifted his feet before thundering them in. She had needed to reactivate the Byakugan just to be able to see the kicks well enough to dodge and weave around them, and tried repeatedly to catch his legs with her kunai as he kicked at her, but she had absorbed just too much punishment and the drain of her doujutsu was cutting her speed even more. She dared not try to block one of those big, black boots with an arm - he would break her bones for sure with power like that.

Finally, she thought he over-committed to a roundhouse kick for her head, and stabbed both blades into the extended knee... only to see them pass through.

She spun, her turn to try to keep him off her back, but she was too tired, too drained, too bruised.

"Sorry, Hitomi-chan," he whispered as he put his hands on her. A little bit of chakra to stick them right onto her back through her shirt, and with a shift of his rippling torso and shoulders, he stepped forward into her weight and lifted her completely off her feet and up over his head so quickly she was disoriented as the ground fell away from her.

Hitomi was brought down, chest first, with irresistible force and dizzying speed, onto Iruka's knee. It struck her right in the middle of the sternum, the strongest point... because Iruka didn't want to drive shards of her ribs into her lungs by slamming her side onto his knee, and he didn't want to break her back by driving her spine onto his knee.

Her chest was compressed so much she blacked out instantly, and as he released her, she flopped limply on the ground at his feet, limbs twitching, still trying to carry out the last commands sent out through the nerves.

"Good job, Hyuuga Hitomi," Iruka said, smiling as he pulled the kunai out of his leg. She had kept fighting even as he'd delivered the finishing blow. A few inches to one side and she would have cut a major blood vessel... Or gotten him in the crotch.

Okay, no dating this girl. Too bad.

"Examiner, this fight is done."

He bent low over her while the medics were still approaching. A few pokes of Tsubo to restart her breathing, and she was okay. Good. He had held back from full force at the last moment. A little bit more and he might have stopped her heart.

Now, quickly, he undid the effects of his fake Dragon's Breathing on himself.

He felt kind of drained now. Not just physically... He just did not feel the way he had expected to. They were cheering up there, cheering for him. People he only knew as acquaintances, people he did not know at all, people who had thought a non-Clan kid who was way too old would never make it as a ninja.

His blood was trickling down his leg.

As he stepped back, medics attended to Hitomi, giving her a cursory examination as they loaded her onto a stretcher. There was a bit of blood coming from her nose. Her clothes were soaked with sweat - she had given it her all, pushing her flesh beyond what it was accustomed to.

Yeesh, getting permission to use the Fist and not even hitting her with it. He looked up and the Hokage was making his speeches about the qualities of chuunin, yada yada, and about how the finalists would have a day to recover before the last duel. Well, he was a little tired. His anti-Jyuuken move took a lot out of the body. But it wasn't enough.

Onizuka Iruka yelled up at the Hokage, a booming voice enhanced by a simple technique that amplified the vibrations of his vocal cords, "Hey, Boss! I'm still good to go. I don't think the audience wants to wait a whole other day, am I right?"

The cheers and roars buoyed him up. Part of him felt like he could fly.

But part of him just felt tired. He was hoping to feel different after this fight, to somehow... feel something special. And it wasn't. It was just like Bro had said. Hokuto Shinken put him at another level... He had not felt real satisfaction from fighting since he had passed beyond the basics of Raging Demon and became the heir to the divine assassin's Art.

The truth was it was a let-down. There had to be more.

"Hokage-sama, if the other finalist agrees, I'm willing to fight him right now!"

It wasn't all brave lunacy, which is what he was sure bro was muttering to himself up there. Iruka did not want to give the Uchiha time to analyze whatever he had learned from watching him with the Sharingan during his fight with Hitomi.

Iruka knew Ryota would accept. The Uchiha were congenitally incapable of humility. His pride would not allow him to refuse Iruka's challenge, especially not since he had time to rest while Iruka was fighting.


	7. Anticlimactic Final

"That idiot."

"What's the matter? He wiped the floor with that Hyuuga chick, barely had to expend any chakra that I could tell. Ohhh, good beer. Thanks, Mr. Onizuka," Anko said, relishing the cold, cold lager with a few big gulps before sighing and leaning back into her seat.

"He shoulda just used his new non-lethal finisher."

Kurenai snorted, "I bet he was just being showy."

"So, dear, how'd Iruka-kun do that? Take all those Jyuuken hits like they were nothing?"

Eikichi just sighed. While he liked Anko-chan, loved Tomoko and found her testy, bad-tempered daughter Kurenai a little cutie, none of them were family. Yet. It just wasn't safe to reveal details about the Hokuto Shinken, even to people who loved you. He wished he could tell them that Mr. Employee's little trick with the fake Dragon's Breathing was a double-edged sword that badly drained his own stamina. He wanted to show off being smart, just a bit, rather than just being the dumb brute Kurenai was sure he was, by drawing out a diagram to show which of his own Tsubo his student manipulated in order to make himself partially impervious to that copycat style of the Hyuuga. And how the longer Iruka had kept them closed, the greater the chance that the idiot's own internal organs would shut down.

He wanted to boast about all the reasons why Mr. Employee would win no matter what the circumstances.

But he didn't, because too many of his predecessors couldn't keep their damned mouths shut about anything, blurting out Hokuto Shinken secret knowledge in every single damn fight because they were oh-so-invincible. Then what happened? Half-trained Nanto Seiken users had started figuring out some of the tricks based on the bits of the Hokuto tricks that had leaked out... and had become far, far more dangerous than they would have been otherwise.

It had taken Eikichi long bloody years to kill them all or to erase the memories of non-combatants who had seen or heard too much. His body was covered in scars from those years, grievous injuries that were much worse than what the Kyuubi had been able to do to him.

So, as much as he'd dearly love to talk shop with the lovely ladies around him, he forced himself not to.

"Trade secret. The usual. I guess I can say that Mr. Employee had to use up more energy than he's letting on."

Little Kurenai-chan frowned, straightening out her utterly plain and practical dark blue jumpsuit and her formal chuunin vest. Gosh, he wished she'd stop that, making herself so much more serious and such than her hottie mother. This wasn't who she really was.

"I knew it couldn't be that easy to just take all those Jyuuken hits," she muttered.

Then Kurenai outright grimaced as her mother draped her mostly exposed curvy flesh onto Eikichi, who turned a bit pink.

He so, so loved Tomoko. She understood the important things about him, the things he kept hidden away - but she also didn't mind indulging his baser instincts, and was secure enough with her own physical needs not to be shy about anything.

"So why'd Iruka want to do the final already?" asked his favorite babe.

There were a lot of sound tactical reasons why, actually. But Eikichi got the impression that the moron had just realized how powerful the Fist was and gotten bored. Mr. Employee just wanted it over with.

"Well, Mr. Employee's gone and pissed off one of the top clans. Figured it wouldn't hurt to embarrass another one. Look, there goes that Uchiha."

Kurenai stood up and leaned over the rail, trying to catch every detail.

"This won't be as easy for the twerp," she said, "The Sharingan will help predict which direction he'll be going in and he'll have to be dodging heavy firepower and maybe genjutsu too."

"Well, it will start out that way, but it will be decided in less than a second," Eikichi said, smirking. "If you blink, you'll miss it."

Mr. Employee was experiencing one of the first side-effects of learning the divine Fist. Boredom. Plus, he knew his adopted son really hated that bloodline. Too much a cheater's thing, too much easy power. Finally, the Uchiha was a guy, and Mr. Employee would feel none of his softy chivalry that he couldn't help himself with against girls.

Anko-chan looked up at him, a little bit of that awe-struck respect still evident in her eyes. Hrmm. The girl thought a little too much of strength, that was for sure.

"Mr. Onizuka, won't he have to hold back from using your real taijutsu style? The Sharingan - "

"Won't be of any use in copying it," Eikichi interjected. "That would just copy the movements, but the movements are meaningless in my Art. There's a lot more to it than moving your hands this way or that way, punching like this or doing a kick like that. There is secret knowledge required to make it work, and there are only two people left alive who have that knowledge."

"Kick his ass, you stupid Uchiha! Toss those fireballs!"

"Kurenai-chan," her mother admonished, "That's not nice. You should be cheering for Iruka."

"Hah! Look at that! The Uchiha's pressing him hard, he's really quick! Look at that, two Kage Bunshin keeping up long range attacks while the real guy's forcing him back with a sword! He's forcing him back!"

It was true. Even Tomoko and Anko looked worried.

To everyone else, it looked like Iruka was at a tremendous disadvantage. It was like the Uchiha could read his mind, could see which direction Iruka would move in before he even started to move. He was getting a few cuts here and there, and there were a few bright red patches of skin on his back, slight burns from fireballs that had gotten too close. The Uchiha was throwing attacks not just at where Iruka was, but where he would be.

And then, in the space between two successive flights of fireballs and kunai, Iruka let out a blood-curdling scream, and this time, the veins on his body really did bulge outwards. A hazy light glowed around his body, and the few shuriken that had struck him on the arms and chest were pushed out of his flesh, the cuts and burns seeming to close and heal miraculously fast.

Eikichi breathed, "Tenryu Kokyu Ho: the Art of Dragon's Breathing - the real thing this time. You should be pleased, girls. Konoha is witnessing a technique that was once guarded so closely, all who witnessed it were executed."

"So... why is he using it? You guys aren't planning on killing everybody!"

"These days, I teach that move to my best Raging Demon students. It's not really a sealed technique anymore, anyway it's much harder to copy than my predecessors had thought - so long as the secret concepts stay secret. Seeing it doesn't reveal anything. Anyway, there's a far more powerful version which has replaced that technique's position in the Fist, one that I haven't taught even to Mr. Employee, yet."

Now, Iruka had unlocked the controls of his nerves over his musculature: whereas humans typically only use thirty percent of their strength, his obliteration of the limitations of his higher mental functions allowed control of the more primal parts of the brain, allowing more efficient nerve conduction and unleashing the full conscious control of one hundred percent of his muscle power. It was a technique of the mind, not of the body. It gave him speed comparable to Mr. Turtle's stupid weight training, without any of the disadvantages.

Anko's hands clenched tight, one of her hands crushing her empty beer can, and she smiled as she watched Iruka moving faster than ever... except for their match in the preliminaries. "He used that in his fight with me too, didn't he?"

"Yes. He wasn't really holding back against you, Anko-chan. He was having to defend himself to the limit of his skill - he was still figuring out how to beat you without using our real techniques when you gave up."

Kurenai frowned, "Even with that thing though... The Sharingan is keeping up. Ryota is still tossing attacks right where the jerk's going to be."

"Yes. Those eyes are why he'll have to do something different in addition."

Suddenly, Iruka stopped all his movement.

"What the heck? Why'd he close his eyes? Why's he not moving?" Anko yelled.

"The Sharingan doesn't read minds and it doesn't see the future. It predicts movements based on the minute positioning and angle of the joints, the tension in the large motor muscles, and the way the fine muscles around the eyes twitch. Higher level sharingan can enhance this by detecting the way chakra is flowing through the body. If Mr. Employee controls those indicators, the Sharingan cannot read him at all."

"But he's backed up against the wall and standing like a statue! He'll get cut to bits!"

The Uchiha hesitated, wondering if it was a trick. Then he understood, and laughed as he and his clones threw a deadly barrage of edged weapons, multiplied a dozen-fold with the Shuriken Kage Bunshin.

Eikichi grinned then. There it was - the Uchiha had just used up a huge proportion of his remaining chakra.

At that moment, Mr. Employee's eyes flashed open. He dipped into a deep crouch, arms crossed and palms up, then leaped thirty feet up into a long, low trajectory, flipping once through the air, right into the intersecting clouds of sparkling steel. He came through it, arms stretched out sidewards as though flying. He landed in a deeper crouch, left knee on the ground, head bent low, right arm extended out in front of him with the hand open, palm forward, left arm across his chest, left closed fist above his right shoulder.

The sound of a hundred ringing notes, like tiny bells, echoed across the pit as every single shuriken and kunai that had come close to him shattered in mid-air, most leaving only puffs of smoke from the destruction of cloned steel, with a few bits of torn chunks of metal scattering upon the ground. When Iruka stood, it was obvious that not one of them had even scratched him.

Iruka announced loudly, "The North Star's Flowing Dance of Ultimate Emptiness! No matter what your cheater's eyes can show you, it is useless to attack me."

Eikichi was sure that there were only nine others in the audience that had been able to keep up with his chosen heir's hand speed for that move.

"Good, Mr. Employee. Now he'll have to attack you up close. He's too drained for anything else, and he's used the last of his throwing gear."

The Uchiha and his clones closed in, and again, it seemed at first that Iruka was at a disadvantage. Every one of his kicks and punches was avoided.

Again, he stopped completely, eyes closed, body in utter stillness. Sweat streamed down his chest and arms, but his face was impassive, expressionless. Peaceful.

With perfect coordination, his three opponents danced about him, swords drawn and at the ready. The Uchiha did not understand exactly how the Dance worked, but he decided on he and his doubles taking a variety of stances to make it harder to read their moves. One assumed a side-on stance with the hilt to the left of his waist, blade angled back, another held the sword out in front of his chest as though about to thrust, and the last assumed a high guard, sword held straight over his head.

Still, Iruka stayed stationary.

They made a simultaneous attack from three different directions at different heights and angles, with a low chop to the legs from behind, a spinning diagonal slash attempting a disembowelment, and a high reverse-cut from left to right: a decapitation move.

And then, he moved. At that point, Eikichi was sure that only he and three others watching had seen all the movements.

"Yaaa atatatatatata!" they heard.

In just a split-second, one after the other, Mr. Employee had darted past the length of each one's blade, and landed two-hundred and three invisibly fast hits in a perfect sequence, right on the money, with about a hundred more meaningless hits thrown in at random just to confuse any Sharingan users trying to copy the movement, just in case.

Eikichi was laughing then. Overkill - Mr. Employee had moved at a speed few Sharingan users could detect, let alone copy.

The wide-eyed, seemingly unharmed Uchiha suddenly cut off his assault. The clones vanished.

Below in the fighting pit, Mr. Employee called out, audible to the entire audience, "Imitation Hundred-Crack Fist: Hundred-Insult Slap of the North Star! Woooo Yaaaaa!" He posed and flexed, hands moving in sweeping, showy arcs before him, the gleaming, carved angles and surfaces of his torso shining in the sunlight.

The ladies with Eikichi as well as most of the audience got puzzled looks on their faces as they witnessed the mighty Uchiha Ryota drop his sword and back away, an increasingly twisted and mortified look on his face while Mr. Employee explained to him what was happening to him at a volume only the two opponents in the pit, and the Examiner, could hear.

"I give up! Ohhhhh owwww..." the Uchiha yelled as he ran away, hands clutching at his abdomen, scrambling up the steps towards the competitors' area, and running into the tunnels that lead to the locker rooms.

"Um. The, uh. Yuck. The winner," announced the Examiner, "champion of this year's Chunin Exam: Onizuka Iruka!"

Only a fraction of the audience was clapping and cheering - mostly they were talking amongst themselves wondering what the hell had happened.

The ladies gave Eikichi looks ranging from what-the-hell to wow-you're-the-greatest.

"Dearest, what did that move do?" Tomoko asked for them.

"Our fighting art allows for much more than just opening or closing chakra points or damaging inner organs. We can manipulate the human body in all sorts of ways," Eikichi grinned. "You'll love this, Anko-chan. Actually, the Hyuuga and the Uchiha in the audience probably know what happened too - their eyes would have seen the spreading stain. It's just luck that the Uchiha was wearing brown pants. Oh yeah, and the Inuzuka. Keen noses."

They still looked delightfully confused.

"Stain?"

"Mr. Employee caused all of the sphincters in the guy's guts to... well, to go a little wild. Explosively so, you might say."

Anko curled up on the floor, pounding the concrete with her fists, howling, laughing, "Nyahaha! Oh god! The Runs from hell move!"

Kurenai looked horrified. "I'm never fighting either of you guys. Ever."

So ended the Chuunin Exam for Mr. Employee.

Now began the most delicate stage, when Eikichi would see just what kind of character Iruka really had. This was when too many Hokuto Shinken students got too full of themselves, started looking down on everyone else. He'd seen it over and over, and had to kill a number of guys and girls that he had once loved, the ones who were too strong for him to just seal away their memories. How would Iruka turn out? Would his sense of humanity, his sense of justice and fairness, survive against the growing knowledge of his own power?

The power always came with the Fist. What was never certain was the character of the man after the training was done. Too many of his predecessors had only cared about the strength of their students.

Eikichi wanted the next Grand Master to be a good man... and one who would still appreciate hot food, copious alcohol, and short skirts.


	8. Bar Buddy

He sat on one of the tall stools at the bar. Stupid fake leather on the cushions. It always made weird sounds from friction with his favorite pairs of jeans.

"Watcha want, Oni-junior!"

Damn it. That's right, another reason he didn't go to this bar that much. Ever since that one time...

"Hey, hey, don't give me that look man! You're freaking scary when you do that. Was just yanking your chain. Nobody thinks of you like that anymore. So, what can the second-cheapest bar in Konoha whip up for the Bloody Butcher?"

"...That's not really better, you know?"

"Ey, everyone knows who you are man. Ain't no other chuunin uses the Fist of the North Star. You're damn famous."

"...Just start me off on vodka martinis and keep them coming."

"One of those nights, eh? No problem. Good stuff or cheapo?"

He had just pulled off his last mission for the ANBU. He had plenty of money.

"The best Fire country makes, but not that crazy pricey imported stuff."

"Mediocre it is."

Clean, burning vodka slid down his throat, a liquid with so much alcohol it could be cooled below zero for that extra chilly kick. A nice vanilla-like scent, just a hint of the harsh chemical aftertaste that indicated this was not quite top-quality stuff.

The heat spread along his belly, his throat, and rose to the top of his eyeballs.

"So, nice to see you, Mr. Butcher."

Quivery, throaty voice, right at his ear. Just a touch breathy. Also a touch off, just that bit insincere.

"Hey, Flat-Chest."

"Fuck you, Oni. Every time, you promise you won't call me that anymore."

There was no real sting in her voice though. It was just a little bit faded.

Iruka sighed, gulped down the rest of the martini.

"Keep em coming."

"Tell me it's not true, Oni."

"I'm quitting, Anko-chan."

She popped him a light hit. The punch would have knocked a tooth out of someone else, but he rolled with it and just got the taste of blood and what would become a nice shiner on his jaw the next day. It wasn't unexpected.

"Shit. Oni... Iruka-kun... you're the best anyone's ever seen. You should be a jounin by now. I thought you stayed in ANBU because... well..."

It wasn't like her to lose courage. He just sighed.

"Time passes so fast. It's not like I thought it would be. Is training under Orochimaru everything you thought it would be?"

"Of course! He's incredible! He's made me a hundred times more deadly! And... he's such a brilliant man, Oni."

"Time goes by too fast, and nothing changes."

He tossed back another one. One of the problems with having become such a big man at a little over six feet and weighing a rock-solid two-hundred thirty was that it took rather more to make him drunk.

"What does that mean?"

Iruka turned to her and put his hands on her shoulders. She went very still and held her breath. Their eyes met.

Under his hands was warm, firm skin, and under that, the hard muscle of another trained killer. She was wearing a shocking pink tank-top today, showing off what was, for her, a conservative amount of pale skin, with just a couple of paler scar lines in view on her belly, fading up under her top and down under her desert-camouflage-pattern miniskirt. Her cute little face had gotten harder, leaner, but still had generously pouty lips, and of course she still had those stunning eyes. She was beautiful, curves and muscle, projected loveliness and hidden power.

He wondered what she saw in him. In her, he saw something cold, something off. And maybe, some of that was his fault. Maybe he'd pushed her too much, teased her too much. And definitely... he should have talked her out of learning from that Snake.

"I'm sorry, Anko-chan. I was an asshole to you when we were younger coz I wanted you to get strong. But strength doesn't bring happiness. I'm so, so sorry."

She gawked for a moment.

Above their heads, the yellow light bulbs of the bar were just a bit too bright, skewed all the colors and made everyone around them look warmer than they really were. The air already tasted of smoke as the number of customers increased. It was a weekday, so most of the patrons were ninja. Few other than ninja came and started drinking so early in the evening.

Anko twisted her shoulders, smacked his hands off of her.

"...The fuck you talking about," she yelled, shaking her head.

Only a couple of the other customers looked at them. Arguments were common when ninja and alcohol were involved.

"Day ago, I got cut off from my team, ambushed by some dumbasses carrying out some unofficial mission to try to get at the secrets of the Fist of the North Star. From the looks of 'em, so-called 'former' ninja of Iwa."

Some of the color left her cheeks, and she put her elbows on the bar and her chin on her palms.

"Makoto, gimme one of those brain-killing things this asshole is drinking."

"Must have been quite a big-paying mission," Iruka continued, as he found himself lost in the nifty reflections and refractions of light in the vodka in the nice looking, shallowly angled glass. Through the glass and the vodka, an average woman with wrinkles and the busted blood vessels in the nose from too much chronic drink became a tantalizing blur, just a mysterious silhouette full of possibilities. Fat men became slender shadows, and skinny dudes could have been giant musclemen. The young and old were interchangeable, if you looked at them through a glass of vodka. "There were a lot of them, Anko-chan."

"I heard about that," she said quietly. "You turned in a lot of bounties. Set the one-day record, only the Yondaime killed more in one fight, and that was over three days of continuous combat."

They got through a martini each in silence as the murmur of sound around them grew. First it was just a trickle of ninja coming in, then as the minutes went by, a few regulars, and even more ninja. It was the usual pre-dinner drinking of the average active ninja. Ninja were encouraged to have vices. There were techniques for fixing them all afterwards to keep performance up, and it was good for the economy. There really was not much else ninja had to spend on. The ones who had Clans would be assigned Clan housing if they lived long enough to start families, and the ones without Clans probably wouldn't live long enough to worry about saving for the future, investing in the market, starting a business and all that, unless they retired.

Twenty was old in ninja years.

So, Ninja villages that could afford it had the best night-life. And Konoha was the richest of them all. The best bars, the best clubs, the best gambling-houses and brothels. Ninja had stressful jobs and had to party the hardest just to get by.

Iruka cleared his throat. Finally starting to feel the alcohol. It dulled the hard edges of the memories.

"They sent in the small-fry first. Stupid kids playing at missing-nin. Then the mid-level guys our age. Then that lone top-class asshole, thinking that I was worn down at last and ready to be cherry-picked."

He let out a harsh sound. It was almost laughter.

"I put my fingers on the Tsubo of fifty people yesterday. There were so many of them, no time to play cute with sleep points or nausea points or incontinence points. Just killing."

She knew all this, he remembered. She had been one of the ANBU sent as additional security with the clean-up crew who had come to the site.

"You saw it, right, Anko-chan? Goddamn kids. Well, you probably couldn't tell they used to be kids."

How could she? The bodies were missing faces, limbs, crushed inside out, exploded from the inside, imploded by the action of muscles going out of control. Some were torn in half. Some had every bone in their body pulverized, leaving a wet sack of flesh. Some had been subject to muscle contractions so terrible the seizures caused their own spines to break. Some were just wet stains on the ground, deflated bags of skin with all the inner bits liquefied and leaking out of the rips on the surface. And on the precious few that still had unmarred faces, the look of total, utter terror.

The ground had been covered in blood and offal, the pieces of people. God, the smell...

"They deserved it," she said. "It's that simple. Or you want me to give you the textbook therapy the ANBU headshrinkers feed to us all the time during the after-action psych evaluations? Shit, Oni. This isn't the first time it's happened to you."

He chanced a look up from his glass at her eyes. Yep. That fucking Snake! What did that creepy psycho do to his precious, mostly happy Anko-chan? Now, she had more in common with that totally flipped out headcase Uchiha traitor than the cute girl he'd once had a thing for. He'd put some kind of evil power-up seal on her, something dirty, and fucked with her head, and now any time she was in trouble she would get those marks spreading on her skin, dark blots radiating evil. She now relied on strength that wasn't really her own.

He wondered if she herself noticed that she sobbed in pain even as she used that black gift of the Snake's.

No, it wasn't the first time he'd been the subject of a large-scale mission. That was the problem. The first year, he had been sure he would remember the eyes, the faces of every single man or woman he had killed.

Now, they were superimposed on top of each other. Each face was the same as another face, the same as the faces of his friends, the face of his Bro, the face of the many chicks he'd crushed on, the faces of the random passers-by on the street.

"It's just time to get out for me. For you too, but I don't think you will. I wish you'd quit from that Snake. Even Bro's changed his mind about that guy."

Anko snarled, "Stop turning this like it's about me. Orochimaru-sama's the best thing's ever happened to me. I got power now, and respect, and don't have to take shit from anybody!"

"Yeah. Sorry, Anko-chan. Just... sorry."

They each got through another glass. Much more slowly, just slow sips. There was a big crowd, by the time they finished, and the dregs at the bottom were lukewarm. The patrons had peaked for now - they would start to ebb away again for dinner, and then the majority of the civilian drinkers would start trickling in.

She sighed. "What a waste, Oni. Nobody can touch you. What are you going to be doing instead?"

"Thinking about teaching at the Academy."

"You'll be back. Those spoiled brats... You'll go crazy bored in three days. Nobody stops being ANBU inside, once you've been to where it's life and death and everything's on the line and your blood is pounding and a mistake could kill you. The place where it's all turns white and your mind lets go."

Yeah, she'd never get it, not now. Maybe, if he'd gone on that date with her after all, maybe things would have turned out different and she'd have stayed the sort of person that could understand why he was leaving.

She looked down into her glass, cheeks pink.

"Damn it, you ass. I'll miss you. Stay."

"Sorry, Anko-chan. Anyway, it's not like I'm going anywhere. You can visit me, when you want."

They knew that wouldn't be happening though. She was an adrenaline junkie now. It was mission after mission for her, and in-between, whatever fucked up training the Snake was putting her through.

"You know, if you quit too, we could still go on that date."

She dropped some cash and stood and turned.

"Be seeing you, Oni."

"Yeah, see you."

Four years of being one of the new 'elite' and what did he have to show for it but blood, and the pictures of bounty after bounty, or the casualties of people that just got in his way? He wished he knew how to get through to her about it. When he had come home the night before, Bro had just seen it in his eyes and known.

He had just said, "Bout time you wised up. Was beginning to think you never would."

That was when Iruka had known for sure that quitting was the right move. Things that seemed complicated were always simpler as soon as he considered, what would Bro do?

The rest of his life would start soon. Man, what was he thinking, signing up for a teaching post today! He didn't know shit about teaching.

And then he just started laughing. What had he really known about ninja anyway, back when he'd decided to be one?

"Hey man, you had too many already or what?" Makoto asked.

Iruka was bent over, chest heaving from laughter that set tears loose from his eyes.

"I'm going to be the best teacher ever, Mr. Bartender!"

"Oooo-kay. Maybe you should be going home now, Onizuka-sama."

He dropped a wad of cash and staggered to his feet. He was not drunk yet. But he felt it. For the first time in quite a while, he was happy again. He faced the mass of puzzled men and women and spread his arms and gave the whole world a double-thumbs-up.

"Attention all my fellow colleagues! You're hearing it here first! You're now looking at the guy who's gonna turn out the best ninja that ever were! Great Chuunin Onizuka!"


	9. First Year Start!

"Hey, you. Mr. Employee..."

Oh shit... the pain...

"Bleargh..."

Iruka cracked one eyelid a hair's breadth and shut it immediately. It was still almost totally dark. All the decent people were still asleep this hour: the sleep of the just.

And the bed was very comforting under his head. Damn head. Next time, if he was going on a bender, he would drink the top quality vodka, forget the price. The greater purity supposedly reduced the intensity of a hangover.

"Mpfagh... Bro... Lemme shleeep..."

"Check the calender Mr. Employee. It's a workout day. You're not skipping it just because you got drunk. You're also not skipping your chores to clean up the Dojo and get it ready for opening. Get up."

Iruka was already fading back into the dull, dark, throbbing comfort of his pillows.

"So that's how it's going to be eh? Yaaah aaataataataataah!"

"Oh fuck! Aaaagh! Knock it off!"

Iruka spilled out of bed, bumped his head on the pine floor of his room, groaning at the sensation of a dozen fist-shaped bruises on his body and three thumb-sized bruises on his cheek. The head-ache had intensified painfully, though the nausea had gone away.

And there was no possibility of sleeping as he felt a rush of adrenaline set his heart pumping crazily fast, and his danger senses going off.

He opened his red eyes and stared hatefully at his Bro. That combo did not produce instant sobriety - it made it possible to function through a hangover, getting rid of most of the symptoms, except for the lingering headache which was intensified and would last all of three days.

"Meanie! Come on, Sensei, it's not the weekend, you don't have any students for hours!"

"With your new job as a teacher, you won't be getting back to the Dojo in time to do your workout and help get it open, so you'll be doing that in the morning, before you go to work. Remember our deal? Now, get up. And don't try reversing those points I pushed or knocking yourself out with a parasympathetic overload sequence of Tsubo, or I'll hit you with your infamous incontinence combo."

Iruka loved Eikichi so, but sometimes he was a merciless asshole. In some ways, he had actually gotten meaner in the ten years they had known each other. Well, possibly, some of that was Bro's disapproval of him joining the ANBU...

"Alright, alright, fuck."

He hoped that the jerk would marry Tomoko soon. She smoothed out his rough edges and kept Eikichi's natural impulses towards cruelty reined in.

Eikichi shut the door to Iruka's room with an echoing slam, which made Iruka wince. Another effect of Eikichi's purposely flawed hangover counter was to enhance the senses for a while.

A brief foray to the loo for a shit and a piss, and back to his room went Iruka.

Iruka stripped off his baggy sleeping shorts and focused through the murky fumbling of his fingers as he wriggled into a pair of black cycling shorts trimmed in yellow and pulled on a gray sweatshirt with the stars of the Bloody Cross printed in red on the back, and the stars of the Great Bear printed in blue on the front. He shoved his feet into a beat up pair of heavy, steel-toed hiking shoes the color of mud, and forced himself through his door despite the siren call of his bed and pillows, the comfort of the naked pin-up girls on his walls and the other temptation of his newest vice: neat stacks of video game cartridges next to a silvery gray plastic box and a TV in the corner.

He was already at the door to the stairwell when Bro closed one of those meaty paws on his wrist.

"Hey, you know the rules."

Argh. Right.

Iruka grimaced as he came up to the kitchen counter and fixed himself a foul brew of raw eggs, milk and coffee, and guzzled it down. Then he choked down a glass of water to clear the taste from his mouth.

"One more glass of water. You're dehydrated from the booze."

"Dude, I'll puke during my workout with all this - "

"Get it down and press the Tsubo to settle your stomach."

Bastard. Iruka forced down one more glass of water, and pressed three Tsubo over his stomach and two on his back to steady the rebellious, gurgling organ.

"And I want ten more pounds on your calf-raises and twenty more on your squats. You've been neglecting your legs - look like a chicken."

"I have not!"

He looked down at his legs, frowning. No way - he had plenty of beef on his legs... But he would add the weight to those sets anyway.

"Go to it, Mr. Employee."

"Yes, sir, Sensei..."

First a four mile run, up and around the long, low hill rising behind the Onizuka Building. Not that anybody called it that. For more than a decade now, everyone called it the Oni-Baku Tower (who came up with calling an old three storey piece-of-shit brick block a tower anyway?).

Up the path to the dilapidated old temple at the top that nobody remembered, all the way back down through the twisting trails, hopping over the twisting roots of cypress trees, all without channeling any chakra or Touki.

He looked at his wristwatch. Fuck! He needed to speed up. He had to push himself extremely hard, and seriously thought about cheating with the use of chakra or Dragon's Breathing, but forced himself to finish the run in under thirty minutes.

Chest and belly heaving, sweat soaking his sweater and shorts, Iruka pounded back up the stairs into Bro's gym.

Stretching for twenty minutes, pulling his arms across his chest and then pulling down with them behind his back and up over his head, a bridge, leg stretches, standing against a wall while he pulled one leg and then the other all the way up until his toes touched the wall over his head, dropping down into a split, pushing his torso down until he pressed his forehead to one knee then the other...

Breath finally steadying, body still warm, he started on his lifts.

Doing as he was told, Iruka added a little over his usual to the bar in the rack, before positioning himself with his shoulders under the bar. Maintaining proper posture, he lifted it off the rack with a huff of effort, took two steps forward to get clear of the rack, and began his squats. A mere three hundred sixty pounds across his shoulders, but even then, if he fucked up the angle of his movements, he'd also fuck up his back. He dipped into a low crouch, but kept his knees from going beyond the line of his toes, kept his heels flat on the floor, and kept his spine from bending forward so that the weight of the bar went down along the length of his spine, rather than acting laterally on the discs. The muscles burned pleasantly with the effort, a little more than they had from the warm-up run.

He straightened, he squatted, he repeated it several times before returning the bar to the rack, thighs bulging as the vessels through his quads filled up with blood at pressure.

He rested and did several more sets.

There was the long, boring sequence of bench presses, military presses and bicep curls and calf raises and bent-over rows and lateral raises.

He paused in between every individual exercise and gulped down the lukewarm water from the drinking fountain in the corner. His stomach was still gurgling now and then, and it was nearly as distracting as his aching head, but he had sweated out pounds thus far, and needed to stay hydrated.

Sometimes, during this part of his morning ritual, Iruka found his thoughts drifting to the strangest subjects. That morning's thinking was not so strange. He merely found himself oddly absorbed by the ringing sound as he'd remove and add the iron discs to this or that bar. There was something soothing about the cool air, being alone so early in the morning, and the chiming of the weights as he worked his body hard.

He went through the full range of motion for each exercise, ensuring that he kept up his flexibility and none of his own muscles got in the way of his movements.

He was plenty big enough, so this routine was designed, for the most part, not to increase mass, but to keep up his muscles' ability to perform for long durations - except for the leg routines, which, with the added weight demanded by his Bro, he'd had to cut the number of reps on, and would take a couple of weeks for his body to adjust to by thickening the relevant muscles.

Finally, with all of his endurance conditioning high repetition sets done, he doubled the weight for each exercise, and did a handful of sets with only three reps each at the absolute maximum his un-enhanced musculature could handle without compromising a controlled lift and proper form. These sets were not about the size of the muscles - they were about muscle-recruitment, focused on how efficiently his nerves could mobilize his muscles. He was screaming on the lifts of the last few sets, especially with the tremendous forces needed for his squats and bench presses. He had actually needed to cheat on the last squats and the last bench presses, needing a short burst of chakra to keep from dropping the bar on himself.

By the time he was done with the weights, the light of dawn had just begun to creep over the hillside and tint the light in the gym through the big glass windows in the front and back, giving some warmth to the room over the cold, faded white of the fluorescent tubes overhead.

More stretching. His martial arts didn't require a contortionist's flexibility, but while he had big muscles, he could not afford to become muscle-bound.

Iruka checked the time, and continued, proceeding through a short plyometric routine, the explosive movements designed to help him produce maximum force in the minimum time. It was about maintaining the high level at which his muscles performed eccentric and concentric contractions, as well as the neurological component: keeping up the maximized sensory response of the muscle spindles and golgi tendon organs.

Hehe, golgi tendon organs: GTOs, mused Iruka. He and his Bro were both GTOs, now: both were Great Teachers Onizuka, in the old tongue of the lost Western continent. They were equally buff at this point too, though Bro was just a bit shorter and yet had two inches more reach. Monkey arms, he sometimes called him during their sparring sessions. Course, Iruka's legs were significantly longer, and gave his kicks a real advantage over Bro's.

More water to drink, then he had twenty minutes of biking to do, the last bit of cooling down. He liked to vary his routes, sometimes sticking to the temple district where monks sweeping the sidewalks in front of the gates to their individual temples waved to him, sometimes the commercial district where the gleaming steel and glass fronts of the banks and office buildings were, sometimes the red light district, where strippers and prostitutes on their way home after a long night of work smiled and asked him if he wanted a last call as he whizzed by them.

This time, he biked all the way up the painfully steep, much taller hill behind the monument of Konoha, and rested up there, watching the morning light crawling across the city below, breaking through the shadows of the alleys and streets and passing through the cracks at angles permitted by the buildings, the heights of which were limited so as not to ruin the skyline. This was the spot from which the First Hokage had seen a vision of what could have been, and where he had decided to found a new Hidden Village, a prosperous place where civilians served ninja, but ninja also served the civilians, where industry and entrepreneurship grew alongside strength, stealth, power and information. And it was also the place where the current Grandmaster of the sacred, holy Fists, the sole custodian of both Hokuto Shinken and Nanto Seiken, was convinced by a golden-haired kid half his age to finally settle down, to stop wandering, to make a home for himself where his strength had something worthwhile to protect.

Iruka found himself thinking about another blond then, not a golden boy at all, from what the rumors said. The brat with the monster in him. He had stopped thinking about him so much over the years - but supposed it was natural to do so at this point, now that he was going into teaching.

When Iruka had just lost his parents, he was just like everyone else who found out that the creature had not exactly been destroyed.

"Why don't they just kill him?" he had asked Eikichi, ten years before, soon after he had begun training in the Raging Demon style.

"Oh ho. Already thinking like a ninja. Easier to kill something feared rather than to learn about it. Easier to think in the short term than the long term. Easier to think of risk rather than potential. Well, you're just a little brat who doesn't know any better, so I'll let that attitude slide. But you gotta think about what it'll be like for that little brat to grow up. He's got no parents, nobody to help him out except the Hokage, and the Hokage is limited by the Council. He's more alone than you will ever be, for something that wasn't his choice."

That kid. He already had a reputation. Iruka would probably get him next year. He hoped to be a good enough teacher by then to handle everything that would come with that. Who was he kidding? He just hoped he wouldn't get so pissed off by some childish kancho-attempt that he didn't kill any of the little monkey brats.

Mizuki, who had become a chuunin the year after him, had been complaining about the orange boy since day one they'd met: constant pranks, perpetual fights with other kids, and though there was never evidence, probably vandalism and theft too. He also complained a lot about the Uchiha - damned genius looked down on all the teachers, barely bothered to come to class, did his best to show up and embarrass 'em. Actually beat up one of the old instructors during 'demonstration sparring.' In some ways, dealing with the Uchiha was worse - he had to suck up to the over-privileged brat. Mizuki had them both for one more year, but, as soon as he'd heard that Iruka was shifting to teaching, he'd said, "I will put up with this delinquent shit for one more year and then laugh when you've got the animals."

"Fuck, I'm going to be late..."

Iruka still had to sweep out the floors of the dojo and arrange the tatami mats on the floor. He could probably get away with not polishing the trophies and memorabilia - he'd done that just before that last, bloody mission.

"Time for some high speed."

Iruka's exercises were done, so it wouldn't be cheating to use chakra to boost himself to a blazing fast hundred mile an hour bike ride back home and then double- or triple-time it through prepping the Dojo. He'd barely have enough time to shower, change, and roof-hop to the Academy.

"Or wait... maybe I can come in impressively late, yeah. That's cool too, right? I can be hip, like Kakashi!"

...Naw. The largest concentration of hittable chicks not employed in the night clubs and cabarets actually worked as chuunin instructors at the Academy. For his future, he had to have a good first-day impression at least with the other teachers! Fuck the headache!

"For the sake of the babes: Super Onizuka Speed!" he howled as he pumped the pedals, screaming down the bike path, glowing from the Touki energizing his fatigued muscles, a whizzing blur that left a trail of dust and leaves whirling in his wake.


	10. Bullied

Lee was a stoic.

Whining and big talk were for wussies. But not for guys like him.

He was tough and silent.

At least, that's how he thought of himself. He played it cool, did his thing, worked hard, didn't complain.

It helped him keep his cool around the girl he was crushing on.

Ugh, girls. Depressing. While he was excellent on written work and tool use and tactics and almost decent with taijutsu... he just could not perform ninjutsu and genjutsu. At all. The best medic-nin money could buy just could not figure it out. It all made him rather insecure about his future. What girl would want to marry him if their offspring might turn out defective like him?

No way! The new school year was starting. Two more years of Ninja Academy to go! Then he could prove himself as a ninja, as a citizen of Konoha, as a man! He'd find a way around or through his disability, just like he ploughed through everything!

...He wondered though, why the other kids always gave him looks like that every time he thought encouraging things to himself...

Before entering the school grounds, he checked his book bag one last time. Directions to the new classroom, OK, notebooks, pens, scrolls, calligraphy brushes, inks, four kunai, twelve shuriken, one coil of thin garrote line, one coil of rated five hundred pound wire, shuko because he still wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to control chakra well enough to plain stick to things like the advanced students with good chakra control already could, third volume of Konoha: A History, first volume of Annotated Excerpts from the Kage Memoirs, second volume of Assassination and Economics, third volume of Espionage and Politics...

"Oops, sorry. Dork."

The impact did not knock him down, but it did jerk the bag in his hands enough to cause half the contents to spill out.

Lee just sighed as three of the moron squad proceeded to dance around him, waving his stuff around and doing the usual taunting.

There was no point in talking to them. Complaining just encouraged thugs. One good thing about being rich - he could care less about whether or not they'd return his stuff after they got bored with it.

He just kept going. He reminded himself to take more care with securing his things next time.

He'd show them all some day. He'd be strong, one of the best in Konoha.

...What was with those snickers again?

God, that stuck-up Neji. Looking down at him with that sneer. And the boss of his hangers-on, that spineless Tenten, copying whatever the so-called best of the Academy did.

Hey, he could defend himself if he wanted! But there was no point getting into detention the first day! He was not a chicken! Anyway, he was wearing new clothes and didn't want to mess them up! He was stoic, a gentleman, he did his best, followed the rules, and he would show them all one day! He was all about stiff-upper lip and composure!

Sitting at the back of the room at the top tier of seats, he got his notebooks out and was grateful that they hadn't gotten Assassination and Economics out of his bag, because that was the first class.

He felt his heart beat a little faster as three cute girls slid into the desks in his row. He wondered why people hassled them so much. They weren't like him - they were pretty good students!

Well... One was great at theoreticals, but sucked at the practicals like him because, while she did not have his problem with manipulating chakra, she was just too young and too small to have the strength and stamina for some of the activities. One was... really random, and on any given day could turn in a brilliant performance or be too distracted to remember to write her name on a test paper. Okay, so the first two were not the best ninja material. The last girl, though, was perfect. Why was she so unpopular? She was so pretty... and strong, and smart. So what if she was older, and had no ninja family? Who cared where she was from?

She was waving at him and he managed to wipe the drool off his mouth quickly enough to wave back.

"Hey Lee-san. Let's have a good year, okay?"

Her eyes were so warm.

"H-h... hi, Sakaki-san. Um. Yeah, let's... do our best..." He was so, so in love.

...Then the little girl with the pigtails was giggling, the middle girl with the accent was communing with an orange in front of her, and Sakaki was blushing. Sometimes he wondered: was everyone else around him a mind-reader? Haha, how horrible and embarrassing that would be. He really could not let his imagination run away like that all the time.

"We have a new teacher. I hope he hates oranges."

"How come, Osaka-chan?"

"If he likes oranges he might steal mine with a ninja trick, then, then I might have to kill him in his sleep or something... I'd take my biggest knife, and I'd... Heh heh heh..."

Her utterly empty eyes and blank grin - it was sometimes really, really terrifying. Okay, he could see how Osaka-chan was unpopular. Sometimes, she was funny and charming, and sometimes, she was creeepy. But he was one to talk.

Must not judge others! That's what everyone did to him! The Out-crowd had to stick together!

The littlest one, brilliant little five-year old Chiyo-chan smiled at him.

"I'm sure he'll be as good as Mizuki-sensei. Anyway, did you study hard during the summer, Lee-kun?"

Umm...

"No? Don't worry 'bout it. I've read all the books for this year already, it's easy stuff," she said, grinning.

Then the front door slammed open, courtesy of a kick that was just short of cracking the thick oak.

A very large man, dressed in cream patent leather shoes, ice-white dress-pants, navy blue shirt and blood-red tie with a blindingly white blazer hanging from his fingers over his shoulder strode in, puffing on a cigarette.

The dull roar of socializing kids was instantly silenced as the big guy stamped his way to the middle blackboard. Even the walk was all 'Mine are bigger than yours.'

His eyes were reddish, and he had on a scowl from the pit of Doom.

Lee glanced at the reactions of his only friends in the class. Osaka was indifferent, Sakaki looked cautiously reserved, and poor little Chiyo-chan was trembling in her seat. He could guess why - the man in white looked very physical and while Chiyo-chan had encyclopedic knowledge, and was brilliant in using both the logical and creative parts of her mind... well, she was five. Great mind, but her body had not caught up yet at all.

Don't worry, Chiyo-chan! Lee promised himself right then and there: he would throw himself in between this beast-looking guy and her any time! Yeah!

"Shut up back there! Shit!"

The man's glare was so powerful, Lee almost fell off his chair. Scary! Actually scarier than psycho-Osaka-chan!

The stranger took a few more puffs, cleared his throat, and rearranged his monstrous face into a transparent attempt at a congenial smile. Like that, it was actually kinda handsome. But the hair was so fake - who had hair such a pale shade of blond?

"Ahem."

He took three big sticks of chalk, crushed them in one hand, then flung the powder at the board.

The other students murmured, surprised and impressed.

"Wow," Chiyo-chan whispered, not at all scared-looking now. "That's amazing chakra control."

The chalk dust, every particle, settled on the board in three gigantic letters. G T O.

"Attention." the man in white said quietly, so quietly, they had to strain to hear him as he raised his fists, "I am Great Teacher Onizuka! Everybody shut the fuck up today. On a normal day I would not care if you listen to me or not or just chat like monkey rats. But today, I am hung-over. So shut up and take your lessons or I'll inflict corporeal punishment on you til you piss blood and vomit up shit. Thank you. On days when I am not hung over, you may call me Iruka-sensei. Today, do not talk. AT ALL."

The last words were not any louder, but his face changed again, and Lee nearly pissed himself as waves of danger seemed to dim his vision, make his heart pound and his belly twist in contractions. Damn that Neji, acting like it didn't affect him at all! But Lee bet this new sensei wouldn't be all accomodating and nice just because Neji was from a big clan! This tough guy wouldn't suck up to the top clans! Yeah!

Lee could feel it, this would be a good year!

"I said silence! You with the eyebrows! Outside, buckets, now!"

What the heck? Why did the teachers always do that? Man, maybe this teacher was just the same...

"You with the snarky look, whispering shit. It's that funny huh? You think Brows-Boy should just quit, eh? You can join your friend out there too, Hyuuga. The both of you consider this a warning - next one who mouths up gets it hard and gets it fast."

Oh, ho, that was better. It wasn't part of the whole gentlemanly stoic thing, but Lee had to savor these rare moments that he could see anger and frustration in the tightness around Hyuuga Neji's eyes, the disdainful curl of the lip. He had not heard it himself, but he supposed this new teacher had great hearing and caught Neji mumbling about fate and Lee inevitably failing, which happened a lot.

Just as they reached the front of the room, that weirdo teacher did something to them both - Lee couldn't tell what. It happened so fast, but he just sensed that for an instant, Iruka-sensei had closed in within striking distance and done something. Well, Lee didn't feel different, but Neji gasped and nearly stumbled.

When Neji turned and looked back at sensei, Lee saw something in those wide, pale eyes and realized it was fear.

Iruka-sensei just smiled at them and said, "No cheating with chakra for you boys, oh no."

"How did you do that? Only Hyuuga can - Onizuka... It's you! The heir to the Sacred Fist - "

"That's right, Mr. Number One. Now get out there and lift your buckets along with your disabled friend."

Disabled? Gosh. Lee had to wonder about that. His head drooped. He supposed it had to get added to his file sooner or later. No, he'd just have to work harder! He wasn't disabled! Just differently-abled! He straightened his head and walked faster. He'd just have to work harder, that's all! He'd grit his teeth and gut it out and wouldn't let out a peep carrying his pails of water while Neji complained silently with that 'This is beneath me scowl!'

"And Hyuuga," Iruka-sensei called as the two students reached the door, "if I hear one word about destiny or fate, I'll seal your tenketsu every single day. Your friend can't help being the way he is, but you can."

Now Lee had to wonder, whatever did that mean?


	11. Potential

Sakaki shook her head. Well, if she weren't a ninja student, she would have shaken her head. Instead, her mouth thinned just a bit. When around others at the Academy, this was what passed as her most severe frown.

Because being open with your emotions, she'd learned, got you hurt.

Only when she was with her friends, outside of the Academy, did she relax and let up, going back to 'normal Sakaki.'

This couldn't really be him, could it?

This showy jerk with the loud clothes, who was temperamental and mean - could this really be that guy?

...But the way he moved, the set of the shoulders, the angle of his neck, that voice.

As the hours passed and he'd gone from Assassination and Economics to giving them about an hour to write out essays about themselves in a sort of dazed silence and then on to Practical Tool Use in Training Field D1 (yuck, a marshy, icky place full of mosquitoes...), he'd loosened up and had started joking some with the students. Really lousy, stupid jokes. And some abominably dirty ones.

Was this really the guy who had thrown himself in between one group of pathetic, exhausted refugees from Iwa and a group of ten killers sent to erase defectors like her family?

There had been a mask. A mask with a demon-face.

"Run. You're almost at the border. Don't look back," he'd said.

She had looked back. She'd stayed around, a little girl hiding in the bushes, watching as one man, outnumbered, alone, fought off ten.

They dropped one after another, blood spewing from behind their masks, some with hands exploding, some howling as they ran away, blinded.

Then the last one, a man with a mask cut from a human skull, had noticed her there, watching, and thrown a spear at her - and Demon-face stopped it from hitting her, catching it in his hands. But it had left an opening, and he'd gotten three kunai in the arm.

"So the Bloody Butcher cares about brats who aren't even from his country? Such sentimentality. Konoha fosters nothing but emotional weaklings."

"You're the Grave Digger of Iwa. You take little girls and boys, and bury them alive, and jack off on the soil above them, while you feel the fading vibrations of their struggles through your feet."

"So, even the famous Butcher knows of me! I'm honored! Well, you're worth twenty times the mission bounty for these miserable traitors!"

Towering earthen giants thirty feet in height rose from the earth above her protector, who wasn't even looking at them, only at her. Through the slits in his mask, she had seen his eyes. Tired, and sad. But there was a calmness there. And kindness.

He had not bothered turning around, just bent low to where she was.

Picked her up in his arms and he'd been so gentle, even covered with the blood of his enemies.

Sakaki had been numb, but something in that look made it better. She was glad to have seen those bad men... the men who had toyed with the remains of her family as they'd run for miles, killing them one by one, torturing them... She was glad to have seen at least some of them get theirs from the Demon-faced guy.

"Hey, you surrendering or what? Turning your back to me like that! I'll crush you and her to paste!"

"But you are already dead."

The giants collapsed, the man... folded in on himself, like everything inside had turned to mush.

"You okay, kid?"

"You... you're bleeding," she'd whispered. "Let me down for a bit."

She had torn off her other sleeve, and wrapped it around his arm, tight around the wound.

He had let her. Then he had picked her up again, and when next she woke, she was in Konoha, alone, facing some little old guy with a funny hat. She was the only one to have made it.

Could this really be the same one? It was years ago. Back then, the Demon-faced one had seemed like a giant - but then she'd been younger, a lot smaller. She'd only had her growth spurt in the last couple of years, but it had been extreme, with her gaining inches in height until she was actually the tallest student in class.

Ugh. Growth spurt. She liked being taller, but... it was really embarrassing suddenly having boobs. She'd lost count of the number of times the guys had snapped her bra-strap from behind or caught them openly trying to peek down her blouse before she'd gotten fed up and beaten a group of them soundly.

She sighed. Now she was feeling bad about having beaten up those jerks a year ago. Why the hell should she feel guilty, anyway? They totally deserved it! But they had looked so damn pathetic.

Okay, focus Sakaki. She was about to put the finishing touch on her trap, finally pulling the lines to full tension. If she screwed up, she might launch a bunch of sharp pointy things - her own sharp pointy things - right at her own backside.

She slipped the knot into place, carefully submerged it into the mud, and smiled.

Take that Hyuuga! She'd finished hers first!

Glancing around, she almost giggled. That silly Lee boy... he'd have been done by now too, but of course he was overdoing it with his trap, making a multi-stage monstrosity when their sensei had just asked them to do a simple one with a snare and spring-loading some blades as a refresher from last year.

"God damn it!" Onizuka-sensei suddenly yelled as several of her classmates totally flubbed setting up their traps and gotten tangled up in their own lines, or were forced to jump or duck, yelping as kunai flew around.

"Okay, break time kids. You're not focusing. Too many mistakes. You're making me stupid. It's time for all of you to goof off. Time for a bottle-rocket launch. Mr. Eyebrows! You are in charge of getting a big bottle of soda! My favorite, Number One, you get a bicycle pump! Go, go, go!"

...It seemed doubtful.

But the way he had moved when Neji and Lee had been sent out of the classroom earlier... it was unmistakeable.

And then he looked at her and she froze up. Those eyes.

"Sakaki-chan, right? Excellent. While we're setting up some good old time-wasting gimmickry, please do me a favor and help your clumsier classmates out of their own traps."

"Waaaah... Sakaki-chan... please start with me first... I can't breathe," Osaka-chan waved feebly from across the mucky field.

As she hurried over to her friend, knife at the ready, carefully stepping around the traps of the other students, she felt inside something like excitement, something like disappointment, something that got bigger as she kept thinking about the color of those eyes. It was an ache, it was all kinds of things, remembering the last day she had seen her sisters.

It was him. And now, as she cut through the tangle of wire that Osaka-chan had somehow managed to loop repeatedly around her face and neck, Sakaki had to wonder: now what?


	12. Trapped

Well. Despite the prolonged headache from Bro's technique, things hadn't turned out so bad for a first day.

"Ugh, I want a beer. Can I keep a fridge full of beer in my office here? I should check the rulebook."

Still. Maybe the little rats were trying to lull him into a false sense of safety. While it had been a long time since Iruka had been in the Academy, with a great many life or death missions in between and a lot of pain and growing up and even some grieving, he still remembered his time as one of the runts. There were always trouble-makers in the age range of Academy students.

He couldn't count the number of times some of his seemingly passive, quiet-type classmates did something like kancho-strike one of the older or handicapped instructors and then do a high-speed substitution to disappear before the instructor could identify the culprit. Then who got it for the ass-hit? Even if it was a miss because of honed battle instincts, the closest student would get blamed, and punished, badly. Punishment only somewhat controlled the kids, and not well, particularly when it was administered to the wrong student half the time.

Ninja techniques plus brats equaled extremely mean brats. Oh, they might act all angelic when there was a watchful eye on them, but one slip and they were remarkably, inventively cruel to each other.

It was unfortunate that most of the instructors were either mediocre ninja, or older ninja forced to retire due to an injury. It made it harder for the brats to respect the teachers - especially the Clan brats, who had all these glorified notions of what ninja ought to be. Great ninja were not supposed to end up at the Academy - they were supposed to lead exciting, well-paid, glamorous lives with the rest of the Village kissing up to them in between dangerous (but rewarding) mission after mission. Teaching was for the losers who couldn't make it - a really strange idea, that one, that it's better to have your next generations trained by those who were not themselves the best.

It did not help that none of the jounin wanted to teach. None of the pricks! Even when training their genin teams, they doled out precious nuggets of so-called wisdom in a slow trickle. If the genin got better, great; if they died or never improved, obviously it was the genin at fault, not the jounin. Iruka could barely remember the name of his own jounin sensei, the guy had been so useless.

And the parents, ugh!

It was a bad cycle that fed back into itself, ensuring that not as many kids fulfilled their potential, and the few who made it were actually not as strong as they could have been. Konoha ought to have twice as many genin as it did, and probably fifty percent more chuunin and a quarter more jounin.

It was an old discussion he'd had many times with Bro, and with the Hokage, who always sighed helplessly, agreeing, but simply resigned to being too old to change things himself. Change was a young man's game, and in the best of times, people resisted change tooth and nail. It would take a young, powerful and extremely charismatic Hokage to fix the system.

As Iruka flipped through his class notes, kicking back in his chair, feet up on the desk, his scowl deepened. Whenever he remembered the jounin assigned to his team, he felt frustrated and wanted to destroy things.

That shit.

He had half a mind to go hunt down that retired fart right now and beat his incompetent ass.

"Or... I could get him with a fifty-six hit combo that will make him permanently impotent!" he cackled.

"Umm... Who, sensei? And could I watch?"

Oops.

He got his twisting, vicious look under control after a few seconds of effort.

This was one of the three broken girls. What did the file say again? Something about knives.

"Osaka-chan, right?"

"Yup."

She fiddled with the ends of her limp black hair as she peered at the chaotic ranks of pictures scattered on top of Iruka's desk. Her mouth was sort of smiling, sort of slack. With her other hand, her right hand, she was caressing the hilt of one of the knives on her belt. Her otherwise neat white cotton blouse was spattered just a bit with spaghetti sauce from lunch, but her combat boots and what Iruka could see of her legs below the hem of her black skirt were perfectly clean, despite the whole class having spent hours more in the muddy marsh during afternoon training. A neat trick that Iruka himself used whenever he felt like wearing his whites.

Right, this was the girl who saw her parents get chopped up. Another kid who ought to be going to civilian school, but was forcing herself to become a ninja, because she had to.

"Err. So, what do you need to talk to your sensei about, Osaka-chan?"

"Huh? Hmm. There was something. Who's that, sensei? She's really pretty."

Oops, again. Hrrm. He really ought to have not just randomly gotten a bunch of photos from his album and put them in picture frames for his desk at the Academy.

"Um. That's, uh. That's my sensei's, err, fiancee."

Iruka cleared his throat and took the picture and dropped it into a drawer. Yeesh, he hoped not too many of his co-workers had seen it. Not that either Eikichi or Tomoko would mind, but it was probably not a good idea to display a picture of her down to her g-string, pole-dancing up on a stage in front of a wide-eyed Eikichi and a drooling fourteen-year-old Iruka - not where students could see it, anyway. Mmmmmm Tomoko's wonderful breasts oiled up and shining under hot white lights, tanned skin, deep red points tracing twisting paths through the air as she moved as though gravity had no hold on her...

How many times had Kurenai tried to burn this picture? Yeah, better bring that one back home.

"Ahem. So, Osaka-chan, is this about what you expect for the rest of the year? You need help with something?"

"Hmm? Oh. That's right. Chiyo-chan told me to get you. You have to go to the second-floor girl's locker room."

"..."

At another time, and if Chiyo-chan was sixteen or seventeen instead of being, well, a little bitty shrimp, Iruka might have leered gleefully and happily proceeded to the mentioned location without another word.

"Osaka-chan?"

"Yes, sensei? Oo, where was that picture taken? What a pretty beach!"

"Why does Chiyo-chan want me to go to a girl's locker room?"

Oh holy crap. Iruka hoped to god it wasn't something like some other girl (obviously, Chiyo-chan was too young for it) locking herself in there, frantic from the blood of that first, unexpected period... There were girl instructors for that!

"Mm? Oh. Lee-san is locked in there. He won't say anything we can really make out and can't come out and Chiyo-chan's really worried about him."

Mr. Eyebrows?

"Riiiiight," Iruka said, sighing. He could guess what this was about. Good thing most of the students had already left. "Okay. You go on ahead and get Chiyo-chan and you both go home already, okay? I'll take care of Lee."

Little monkey-rats.

He'd been that pathetic once.

Puffing on another cheap cig, Iruka ambled out his office, down the hall, down two flights of stairs, and walked down the south wing of the Academy.

It had gotten pretty large in the last ten years, he thought.

Though Konoha had suffered almost no ninja casualties in the attack of the Kyuubi due to Bro's intervention, the event had served as quite the wake-up call for the ninja of the village. They were knocked out of their complacency and had pushed hard for an increased budget for additional training facilities and recruiting. Even though only a handful of ninja had actually participated in stopping the demon, the civilian members of the council who represented a large percentage of the village's economic power, had agreed.

The economy in Konoha had just been about to truly hit its stride. If Bro hadn't been around to help the Yondaime, all that potential wealth-building capacity, as well as the lives of half the Village, would have been wiped out. Most of the ninja forces, the fertile rice terraces carved out of the mountains, the manufacturing district where all the factories were, all these things would have vanished, destroyed by a single, previously unknown enemy.

Because Konoha had survived mostly unscathed, it became the truly dominant power on the continent, the richest city in the richest nation, supposedly with the strongest ninja. Fire Country's best and brightest moved to Konoha to do their business, because of its perceived security, and their children sent to its civilian schools because of supposed higher quality instruction... Every year, Konoha grew, and to protect the gains of the every more wealthy elites, the financial guilds agreed with their cousins in the ninja clans to spend to expand the military of Konoha.

The industries had grown because of the ninja, and the ninja had grown too... but not nearly as much. Now, the civilian businesses generated income and taxes that far outstripped the money from missions.

His footsteps practically echoed down the huge hallway. The Academy was bigger than ever.

And it had to be.

As Iruka trudged along, getting pissed off all over again, he thought about the tremendous waste going on. So many more being trained in the Academy, and most of them would flunk out because the ninja clans did not quite realize all the changes that ought to occur to make the most of Konoha's growth. They had taken the money of the ever richer merchant class, promising to use it to build a Konoha that would not need to fear anything like the Kyuubi, and wasted it.

These new wings... What was the point of having hundreds more potential ninja students when the clans refused to send their best to teach them? Why should the few jounin who were not clan-affiliated bother teaching at the Academy when the salary was so much lower than what they could get for a few high-level missions a year?

And the ninja clans were still holding back most of their best tricks, so greedy that the few clan members teaching at the Academy were ordered to withhold even simple drills for physical conditioning.

In the end, the number of genin that actually graduated had barely increased despite the bigger, better facilities, and the vast increase in the number of students just meant there was a vastly greater number of kids who were told they could not handle being ninja and had to find another calling in life.

In fact, quality of instruction had gotten worse. There were only a few more chuunin instructors than before, and now they had to handle so many additional students! This almost guaranteed that only the kids who got most of their real ninja training from their own families could pass.

"What a great scam those fucking clans run..."

Well, here he was, in front of a bright yellow door with a simplistic outline of a stick figure with a dress, done in pink, over the words 'Locker Room.' If it was up to him, it would be the picture of a kick-ass ninja babe in revealing attire carrying a big sword! What the hell kind of abstraction and objectification did it imply that the symbol for girls was flat and skinny and always wore a pink dress?

Iruka reached for the door knob. Paused once, twice.

He looked left down the hall, he looked right up back towards the stairs. He glanced over his shoulder at the windows behind him.

If Kurenai saw him, she couldn't beat him up or anything... but she could ensure that he would have no chance of scoring with any of the other lady teachers of the Academy. EVER. He was sure she was already telling them all sorts of crap about him, even as she finally got her shit together to make her push for jounin promotion.

Bitch. She was only applying for jounin so that she could leave the Academy with more status. And she was only leaving because he had decided to teach here. How the heck did such a warm, generous, loving, fun woman like Tomoko give birth to such a repressed bitch?

Iruka closed his eyes and reached out with his assassin's senses to be sure.

It would be just like Kurenai to use some stealth genjutsu and follow him around to make sure he wasn't harrassing the girls.

Harrassing the girls! She had actually warned him about that at lunch! Come on! He wasn't a lolicon sicko!

"Hrrmm. Lee? You still in there? I'm coming in."

Iruka heard a faint mumble, something like sobbing. Great.

He opened the door and went in. It was easy to tell which one Lee was trapped in. Poor kid was damned loud.

"Man, they really wanted to make it tough to get you out, eh? This is the biggest padlock that can fit through the holes on the door!"

"Sensei? Are Chiyo and Osaka and Sakaki gone? Please make them leave first!"

"They're gone, kid. Now, just a sec."

It was a good thing that Bro was finally teaching him the mirror styles to Hokuto Shinken. He could just rip the lock completely off with brute strength, but then he'd have to pay to get the stupid door fixed.

Iruka focused. All ninja learned that chakra was a mixture of body energy and spiritual energy. One of the greatest secrets of the two divine Arts was what Bro had taught him was traditionally referred to as Touki. It was essentially the same, being a mixture of body energy and spiritual energy... with a seemingly trivial difference. The ninja of today generally mixed the two energies either in equal proportion, or with slight variations based on the eccentricities of their first teachers that made them accustomed to flowing chakra with a certain ratio of body to spirit. A small number of techniques might require more spirit or more body.

Touki was perfect chakra - with a fundamental ratio that made it much more efficient. Touki was much easier to channel through the inner coils, allowing for explosively fast energy manipulation without the use of hand seals - a necessity for any attack in the Fist.

He looked down on his fingers and frowned. He still wasn't used to the Nanto styles' demands on using Touki externally. Hokuto Shinken was an internal art - its few external energy techniques did not require the same degree of skill moving Touki outside the body. Of course, if he had learned Nanto Seiken first, it would have been far, far more difficult for him to learn the intricate inner manipulation of Touki required by Hokuto Shinken. He just had to concentrate harder.

"Gods above, I want a beer."

There. He sensed the change occurring in the aura over his finger tips.

Iruka pressed two fingers against the heavy steel case of the padlock. His index and middle finger penetrated through it as though the forge-hardened steel was warm butter. It fell to pieces on the tile floor, ringing with the sound of the vibrations his Touki had subjected it to.

Now if only it was this easy for him to interpret the scrolls about the secret branches of the Hokuto arts. It was mind-blowing trying to study Hokuto Ryuken and integrating its knowledge of hundreds of additional Keiraku Hiko, beyond the seven hundred and eight he had already learned. So much goddamn anatomy and physiology! The hell. Bro had done a lot to clean up some of the extraneous junk from the long history of Hokuto Shinken, but there was some stuff in the legacy that was just silly. Hokuto Shinken itself was so secret, what did it mean for there to be secret branches? Especially since there was now only a single line of descent.

One day, Iruka would be the one to put it all together, one perfect art, the best of Hokuto Shinken and Nanto Seiken and all the related arts together in one pure combined form.

Enough dreaming though. Iruka composed himself. He had to cheer up a student. Man, how much would he have given to have had a single sympathetic teacher when he had been at the Academy.

He pulled it open, grinning.

"There now! I have... to say..."

Okay, maybe this was a little worse than what he had expected. No wonder the twerp didn't want the girls around.

The boy was tied up. He was also dressed in a girl's uniform from Seirin Gakuen. Nice, an insult underneath the underneath.

Think positive, Iruka! Say something comforting and sensitive!

"Well. At least they did your make-up okay!"

Lee just curled up tighter and cried.

Well, that was a stupid thing to say. Ergh. What to do?

At that point of course, things could only get worse.

Kurenai burst in so quickly that the door came off its hinges. She was screaming stuff at Iruka and Lee was freaking out even more and Iruka's head-ache intensified back to the levels it had been in the morning. She was screaming something about searching for him for a half hour, and corpses.

"Slower! Say it slower, girl!"

She clamped a hand tight around Iruka's and, burning chakra to her limits, pulled him along as she tried to run.

"Shit, Iruka! I've been looking for you everywhere! Come on! I'll brief you on the way!"

"I've got a student to attend to here!"

Kurenai clapped her hands onto his jaw, dug her fingers into his cheeks and dragged his face down til their eyes were level. Iruka found himself startled by the clamminess of her cold, sweaty hands, and the wild, frightened light in her eyes.

"The Hokage. Investigation. Orochimaru."

Anko!

Iruka felt his shirt exploding away from him in shreds before he quite knew what he was doing. He lifted Kurenai up in his arms. It was a sign of how worried she was about their friend that she did not protest in the slightest.

"I'm faster. Just tell me where to go," Iruka said.


	13. Creeping Hours

Lee did not really understand what that was about between the two instructors. But he understood there was an emergency. Of course there were things more important than some dumb student getting...

Anyway, it must have been serious. Onizuka-sensei was surrounded by intense light as his muscles bulged out and his shirt ripped off of his torso. His face was expressionless, but Lee could feel anger from him greater than he thought anybody could be mad. The two teachers moved so quickly, they vanished from view.

Well, Lee didn't die like he had been wishing after the first hour, and Sakaki-chan hadn't seen him like this yet, so he had to try to keep it that way.

With the door open, there was plenty of room for him to wriggle out of his bonds. He crept as stealthily as he could to the guys' locker room. He was seen by just a couple of other students, and he just ran the last hundred feet as they laughed, flashes brightening the corridor. He wasn't that worried about a camera, it would just be a blur. Fight for it and that would only give them more chances for pictures, and thinking of how Sakaki often stayed around after classes for extracurricular stuff, she might appear anywhere at any moment, and if she saw him like this, he would take his...

Damn it, all he had on him was a pen. Anyway, if she saw him, he'd take his pen and jam it through his neck til all the blood went out of the carotid arteries.

He ripped the clothes off, and washed his face. Hard. Damned stuff didn't want to come out. Eventually, as he gazed in the mirror, he supposed it was enough. His eyes and skin were red from the scrubbing, but his lips were pale, and his lids weren't painted green anymore.

Extra change of clothes. It was missing.

Okay, that was too much. But he did know which locker belonged to one of the assholes. He took his hidden toolkit out of his locker, drew out a couple of tiny probes, and picked the lock.

Lee took the other boy's too-large clothes and pulled them on. Jeans that pooled over his feet, a sweatshirt he disappeared into.

He heard others gathering outside the locker room door, banging on it. He must have locked it without noticing.

At that moment, Lee just felt tired. Just the first day, and he felt worn down to nothing.

He opened the window, took the twenty foot drop without too much trouble, rolling with the impact. His shoulder and back ached from the bruises caused by the impact being spread out across his body by the roll, but he was used to doing stunts like this without chakra. Of course, his classmates would not have even been bruised. Some of them would not have even gotten dust on their clothes.

Just kept walking.

Everything felt dim. Usually, he didn't feel this crappy until at least halfway through the school year.

Looking up, he saw that the sun had almost fully set in the distance. At the edge of the sky, there was still the faintness of orange and rose. The street lights had come on. Even without the rows of lights along the streets though, Konoha would have stayed bright deep into the night.

There were plenty of shops with neon lights, brightly lit signs, display cases with spotlights showcasing all sorts of things.

People went by on horseback or riding carts pulled by horses or oxen in the middle of a broad street of flat white paving stones - limestone, imported from coastal quarries. Closer to the sides, people pumped their legs on bicycles. And everywhere, people were walking.

He smelled food from the restaurants, dung from the animals, smoke from the small number of petrol-powered trucks pulling the huge cargo containers that delivered products from the factories on the east side of Konoha out along the main roads to the train stations where rebuilt steam-driven trains delivered Konoha's best to the rest of the continent, or returning, bearing raw materials like ore, raw cotton, sheared wool, logs of wood... From the drains and grates along the edges of the street rose the hint of sewage drifting along beneath the city, masked by the many fruit trees and flowering bushes planted at even spaces along the sidewalks. There was the smell of all those people too. Sweaty people, dirty people, tired people, clean girls in perfume out for a night of fun, the nervous boys on their way to meet them. It was a powerful smell, the smell of a city.

"Lee-san! Is that you? Hey, want to check out the latest imports?"

Back in front of one of the many stores that had some tie to his family.

"No thanks, Mr. Yamada. I was just taking a walk."

"Well, you tell your father that things are going real well! These new games are selling like crazy. Does he like cigars? I should give him a gift..."

"No, no, Mr. Yamada. You don't have to give anything. The best gift would be you keeping accurate accounting and running your business well - nothing satisfies my father like seeing his investments bear fruit."

Mr. Yamada just grinned hugely. It was a friendly, open grin and it softened the hard look given to his face by a square jaw that was too big, and a thick neck like a bull's he'd gotten from some hobby he had.

"Maybe so. Hey, out kind of late, aren't you? Guess they work you hard at the Academy."

"Y-yeah. Anyway, be seeing you, Mr. Yamada."

"See you, kid. You pass by Nagano's down the street - he's trying out a new recipe for the patties in his burgers and would like your opinion. Oh, he's also picked out some great tuna from the market today! He'll want you to take some of the best cuts home for your old man."

Mr. Yamada bowed to him and, a little embarrassed, Lee returned the gesture.

Maybe Neji was right. Maybe he ought to quit. There was plenty he could do. Outside of the shadow world of ninja, he belonged to a powerful, respected family. He was already good at math and spent the summers helping his father's accountants with tax computations and forms. During the winter holidays, he went the rounds with his father, checking on the inventory of their warehouses across Fire Nation. He couldn't do a substitution or make a clone, but he could spot it when an employee was trying to fudge the numbers to skim off the top, and had a good instinct for picking out the winners amongst the dozens who approached his father for a loan to start up a business.

Hell. The Hyuuga Clan actually owed his family quite a bit of money. They never did take enough missions outside of Konoha because of their paranoia over someone getting at their eyes, so that huge compound of theirs, which required tremendous resourcs to maintain, only still looked good because Lee's father regularly advanced the Hyuuga quite a lot for ninja security for their business interests around the continent.

He had a lot to think about. But first, some fish from Mr. Nagano's restaurant, because Lee's father really liked a specific degree of marbling and texture that Mr. Nagano excelled at picking out.

He sighed, hoping that Onizuka-sensei would forget about visiting him at the house later. He didn't want to be around for his father talking things over with the guy.

Mr. Nagano didn't just give him about a dozen pounds of expensive, perfectly chosen, perfectly cut tuna, he also gave Lee a ride home in his delivery van. It smelled like fish, but Lee appreciated the gesture. He was tired, really tired.

Somehow, Lee managed to skip out on dinner with his father, and just hide in his room. Anyway, his father was used to his moods.

He could lose himself in games, or in stories about lost places, or make a model sailing ship.

He just lay in bed quietly, looking at the ceiling.

Knocking on his door. A crack of light leaking in.

"Yes?"

"Hey, kid. Leftovers in the fridge. I have to take off early in the morning tomorrow to negotiate next year's deal with the dockworkers' union in Tea Country. Maybe a week, okay? Just ask Haruko if you need anything."

"Okay. Umm. Father?"

"What?"

"You really okay with me being a ninja instead of taking on the businesses?"

"Hey. Lots of time left, you know? I'm a pretty healthy old dog! They're also not mutually exclusive goals. The company almost runs itself now, it would leave you plenty of time to do the ninja thing. And you'd have to retire from being a ninja eventually, and when you did, the company would be there for you. Anyway, you know... I wanted to be a ninja too, when I was a kid. I understand."

"Okay."

"So, see you, okay? You know how to take care of yourself."

"Okay. See you in a week."

Darkness and thinking.

The hours slid by. Sometimes he was awake, sometimes he dreamed, sometimes it was just darkness.

At dawn, Haruko knocked on his door.

"Young sir? Your breakfast is ready."

"I'm not feeling well, Haruko-san. Please just bring it to my door. I... won't be going to class. At least for a few days."

Maybe not ever, anymore.

He took the tray, munched half-heartedly on tasteless toast and butter, fish and rice and pickled vegetables. Slid the tray out of his door, lay back down and pulled the covers up over himself, up to his nose.

With only his eyes peering over the edge of the cotton sheets, he imagined it was like he was invisible. He turned on his side and curled up into a ball, a small sphere of closed space.

White ceiling except for the dark oak beam crossing the center of it. Lamps, standing and bedside and desk. Electric fan, spinning and blowing. The bookshelves packed with books, for math, for history, for business, for ninja stuff. Scrolls on his walls with bits of ninja wisdom condensed into pithy aphorisms. Hardwood floor, no tatami, because he liked the shine of the wood.

He had a TV in his room and games, gifts from his father when he made it through the first few years of ninja academy.

The doors to his walk-in closet were open. He could see his clothes, civilian stuff for goofing off, fancy civilian stuff for when he wore his 'son of a businessman' hat, tougher things for ninja-ing. Shoe rack: casual sandals, exercise shoes, brown dress shoes, black dress shoes, hiking boots, ninja sandals, split-toe ninja boots. And his armory: gleaming rows of blades in racks, shuriken on hooks, weighted combat chains coiled up tightly, the sword a cousin got for him that he wouldn't be tall enough to use for another six years maybe, first aid kit, spare climbing claws, sickle and chain, and his spare traps kit with springs and pliers and coils of wire and line and scissors and oil and slender metal probes. The boxes filled with his old interests: old toys, old comic books, magazines, model kits.

Lastly, the little picture of him and his parents together, standing atop a mountain. The last vacation they had together before she left them for some jounin.

Lee considered whether this room held all the phases of his short life, and decided, no. There were all the places he'd gone with his father, all the offices where he'd tinkered with the accounting or checked the records or suggested optimizations for the book-keeping.

His life stretched all the way out to all the countries around them.

If he went the other way, if he went to one of the civilian schools, there would be so much more time. Time to find more friends, to goof off, watch movies, get caught up in the new shows being produced for the new Fire Country TV broadcast channel, to think about the future: finding and fixing more of the lost technology from before the days of fire that wiped the maps clean.

His family had made its fortune in figuring out how to get the trains running again. The continent had become suddenly smaller. Before, only ninja could get from place to place with any speed. Now anybody could. And it just kept getting bigger and bigger. First the steam engines, then they had to buy steel companies to get enough steel for the rails, then coal-fired electric generators to power the foundries, and then the money just kept pouring in and his father thought, why not return some of it to Konoha? Invest here, invest there - there were markets that previously took a month to get to that they could now reach in a few days.

To think all this reclamation and progress could have been wiped out if the Kyuubi had advanced even a few miles closer to Konoha... It would have run right over his father's warehouse where their family had been studying steam engines and internal combustion engines and trains and the old maps of railroads. All that would have never happened.

And they owed it to two people. One ninja, the Yondaime, and one civilian... the Demon Explosion, Onizuka Eikichi. Iruka-sensei hadn't mentioned it, but the relationship was pretty obvious. He even looked like the pictures of the Demon Explosion in the history books, the grainy pictures taken by a civilian with an antique camera, of a huge, blond man standing fearlessly in front of the monstrous fox, and in the distance, the silhouette of Yondaime standing atop a giant toad.

He could be strong without being a ninja, he could do great things without being a ninja, find happiness and meaning without ever having to go through another meaningless session of meditation trying to connect with his chakra.

Lee sighed.

It really came down to chakra. He could feel it. He could mix body and spirit and feel the resulting energy... but he couldn't do anything with it. Talking to Chiyo-chan, the most analytical of his classmates, the rest of them could feel the changes in the flow of chakra when they formed the mudras, the hand-seals that affected the currents in the inner coils and were used in sequence to tie the flows of chakra into techniques... When Lee did the elegant-looking hand gestures, there was no effect on his inner coils.

Practice did not help. Meditation hadn't helped. And every ninja medic they had hired said there was nothing wrong with his inner coils... he simply could not manipulate them with hand-seals.

He had always felt, well, he could be great with the tools, he could still be stealthy, and Oni-Baku had shown that even non-ninja could be powerful fighters. But it was just so much harder for him.

For the other students... Even Chiyo-chan, who was so little she barely had any stamina to convert, could boost her strength with chakra well enough to leap ten feet into the air. Lee couldn't do that no matter how much he exercised. Chakra to help throw blades faster than the eye could see, chakra to sense others around them, chakra for the techniques that allowed others to breathe fire or to shape the wind or to call on the water or to shake the earth.

Everything was harder for Lee. Physically, he was in the best shape amongst the class, nearly a match for Sakaki's conditioning, but as soon as chakra came into it, he could not match the speed or strength even the weakest of the others could put out.

After years of trying, he had finally made some progress that summer. He still could not manipulate the flow of chakra with mudras, but he had started to be able to shift it around in his body the way the others could. He had held out the hope that with this, he could at least match the others in taijutsu... and make it enough.

But it had taken so long, and it would take longer yet before he could focus the flow well enough to get more than a slight boost.

Those assholes showed him that the day before, that was for sure. Even the skinniest one could focus chakra faster than he could, could boost his strength and hold Lee's arms still by himself...

Lee squeezed his fists tight.

How much practice would it take? For the other kids, learning how to manipulate the flow with hand-seals sped up learning how to manipulate the flow without the handseals. They'd had years longer to get it. Even if his form was better and his muscles were stronger, as soon as those other kids focused chakra, they'd get almost fifty percent stronger while he maybe only got twenty percent stronger...

He could hear Neji telling him, just quit. He wasn't meant for this, that's all there was to it.

Maybe Neji was right.

Lee got up and turned on his TV and put a disc into his new game machine and lost himself in the lights on the screen and the sounds as he made his way through another life, a life where was the hero and the world around him was just something to solve or fight or get through.


	14. Regrets

Outside the room, two muscular blonds paced, and cursed, and chewed at the ends of unlit cigarettes.

One was taller than the other, but not as broad in the shoulders, not yet as deep in the chest. They were both powerfully built, wasp-waisted, heavy-limbed. One was in dusty white trousers and a tank top, the other in black leather pants and heavy boots, with steel pauldrons over his shoulders. The one in white was obviously younger, his face not yet as lined, not yet as solid and worn. The other's bare chest and arms revealed the signs of many battles from long ago, ragged slash marks and curious, puckered, round scars the width of a finger.

Eventually, they sat on the wooden benches bolted to the floor.

Under the fluorescent lights, their tan skin was less so, their eyes darker.

"You can say it, Iruka."

"It's not your fault."

"Course it is. Who suggested it to that psycho? Me."

"He woulda done it anyway. He already had his eye on her. Maybe it's my fault. I coulda talked her out of it. I coulda done lots of things."

"Hmph. Least I kept him from killing you."

"Yeah. You did."

Iruka scowled. Orochimaru was quite a clever beast. Nicked him with that poison blade while he'd been focused on examining Anko, kept the pressure up with mud clones and heavy firepower moves to keep him from treating himself, and Iruka steadily got slower and slower. It showed him he still had a long way to go.

Bro had appeared in time, and demolished the Snake, completely cut the bastard's arm off with a Nanto style slash of his left hand, landed a power-cutting kick on the other arm that so weakened the muscles that the pale hand dropped his legendary sword.

Orochimaru, reduced to fleeing in terror and disgrace.

"You should've killed that shit."

"If I chased after him," Eikichi snarled, "the poison would've killed you. Not to mention, Anko-chan needed treatment right away. I had to make a choice and I did."

"...Yeah. Sorry. Wish they'd let us smoke in here."

"She'll be fine," the broader, older man said, almost to himself. "I'm sure she'll be fine. I... I reinforced your work before the medics got there. The worst of her memories should be sealed away permanently. And the shit you pulled with her coils worked."

Iruka rubbed at his eyes. Looked at the clock halfway down the hall. He hated the sterile, chemically clean smell of hospitals.

"Think she'll thank us for that, or be pissed?"

"I'm her favorite. She'll obviously be pissed at you for not managing to do more damage to the guy before I got there."

"Maybe she'll be pissed at your short legs for taking so long to get you to the battle."

"My short legs? It was your wussiness kept you from coming through on the date after the chuunin exam."

"I learned wussiness with girls from you."

"Well... shit."

Heels tapped nervously against puke-green tiles.

The door opened. Sandaime stepped out first, escorted by two top combat jounin in Gai and Kakashi, and two of their best interrogation and intelligence specialists in Inoichi and Ibiki.

Iruka had worked with them all. His fists clenched up tight, blood dripping from his fingertips digging into his palms. Anko was in there.

"They are sure she is not a traitor," old Sarutobi told the two Onizuka. "She appears to have no knowledge of the traitor's experiments. And her mind will recover. I don't know how you did it, but Orochimaru's seal is broken. Now, you two, talk."

Eikichi stood.

"I am not one of your dogs, old man."

He walked up to the door. Gai and Kakashi each placed a hand on his shoulders.

"Let go, or you both lose a limb," he said quietly.

"Bro's in a killing mood. He's not bluffing. Anyway, he'll say the same thing I will," Iruka said.

Sandaime nodded, and his escort parted. The echoes of the door slamming behind him made Sarutobi wince.


	15. Extra Studies

Chiyo-chan was a genius.

She knew it. Everybody did.

The only reason she had a hard time was that everybody thought she was too young. The instructors loved her, but because her child's body was so weak, she just could not match any of the other students physically. She had perfect technique and control and a brilliant mind, but burned through her stamina so quickly that any practical test or exercise lasting for longer than a few minutes left her as useless as Lee.

But she had no time to wait to get older.

She had to become a ninja as soon as possible.

"Will this... will this help me become a ninja sooner?"

Sensei rubbed his temples. It was two days later and it still looked like he was suffering from the same hangover. Unless he got drunk again? He didn't seem like the type to get drunk so frequently.

"Chiyo-chan, I like you. So lemme lay it on you straight. As things stand now, you could easily become a genin at the same time as Sakaki-chan, in two years. You will be one of the youngest genin in Konoha's history, the youngest since Uchiha Itachi. But unlike Itachi, you don't have a bloodline to help you cheat. And while you have the technical skill to pass all the tests and to become a genin... the first real fight you're in, you'll probably get killed."

No way! She'd figure something out. Brains always won! She just needed to...

"I know what you're thinking, but tactics won't help if you get into a situation where your enemy has the drop on you and doesn't give you a chance to get space and think. You also can't always depend on your team-mates to get you out of a jam - sometimes, it has to be you who protects them."

She twisted her mouth and just kept from tugging on her pigtails in anxiety.

"I have to," she whispered. "I have to make it as soon as I can. And then make chuunin, and then jounin, as soon as I can."

Sensei leaned back in his chair, took a sip from a cold can of beer.

"Yeah, well. That's why I'm encouraging you and your friends in particular, to sign up for classes at the Onizuka Dojo."

"You said it was optional, and that any student that applied for the extra classes had to pass tests... Sensei, I..."

"I already know which of the kids won't be interested at all, like the Clan brats, and which of them don't have the character, like those bullies that pick on you and Lee when Sakaki and Osaka aren't around. The three of you, and Lee, are already in. You just need to show up for the training."

Biting her lip, she looked down at her little hands on her lap. She didn't like taijutsu at all. It was where everybody else could show they were better than her. But they weren't! They were just... bigger...

But really. She knew that 'bigger' was a part of it too. They were better. And Sensei wasn't trying to hold her back like the other teachers, he was offering her a solution to her main problem.

"I don't know."

Osaka-chan and Sakaki-chan wouldn't stop talking about how awesome the extra classes were, and they'd only started the day before. They'd been bugging her to join all day. Especially after Chiyo-chan lost her evaluation sparring matches today so badly.

"The martial arts that Bro and I teach you and your friends will improve on your strengths and also help with your current weaknesses. Believe me, Chiyo-chan. Stick with the classes, and you three will become some of the strongest ninja of Konoha. You'll be the strongest girls since... you will be stronger than Tsunade."

Chiyo-chan looked back up at him. He wasn't making fun of her, he wasn't humoring her, and he was trying to help her out. He hadn't excused her from the sparring matches today and the day before the way the teachers of the years before had, and hadn't sheltered her from getting her butt kicked by the bigger kids.

There was a fire in his eyes, and that made her want to try her harder.

"Okay."

"Okay! Good. One last thing. Lee's been cutting."

"He's just sick, Sensei. I called him and - "

"He's been cutting. You get over to his house and tell him to get ready to be back in class tomorrow. Tell him about the offer with the Dojo. And tell him one more thing."

Now Chiyo-chan wondered about the change in Iruka-sensei. His eyes suddenly looked very sad. Then he chugged the rest of his beer, and crushed the can in his hand to a little shred of aluminum.

"Tell him that I'm sorry about not coming by two days ago like I said I would. The situation with... Well, I'm sure he's caught it on the news already."

That would be the situation with that creepy Orochimaru guy. Chiyo-chan shivered. The bit on the news didn't cover too many details, but there had been a few pictures of that lab, and the bodies... Those poor people.

"Anyway, I was involved in the search and... Some of my friends were hurt pretty bad. Been visiting the hospital. But warn Lee: I'm definitely dropping by his house later. You give him that message after school today on your way to the Dojo, got it kid?"

She nodded.

Her stomach was already twisting in worry though. Taijutsu classes just never went well for her. Would it really be different with Onizuka-sensei? From what Osaka-chan and Sakaki-chan told her, it was pretty harsh. If she got injured, that would just delay her some more. And to go to those classes, she'd have to cut back on her part-time job at the noodle place...

"Hey. Don't worry so much," he gave her thumbs up and a broad grin. "Listen, I know why you're in such a hurry. It will be okay... hey, hey, don't look down."

"It's... embarrassing," she said quietly. "It's... the treatments are so expensive. The money's going so fast."

"Yes, I know, and I know you're on a scholarship and all that. She'll be okay, kid. And you'll be a ninja quick and helping with your family situation in no time."

In no time. She hoped he was right. The way things were going... her family's only chance was for her to pass and become genin on the first try, and then for her to pass and become chuunin in her first year, so that she could start getting the better-paying missions quickly.

"There you are with that look again. It's not a cute look at all. Doesn't suit you. You're just a kid, Chiyo-chan. Take a little more time to goof off."

She chewed on her lip some more. She could feel him looking pointedly at her little hands, at the calluses and blisters on her fingers from all the training, and from the occasional burn from getting spattered with hot oil or broth at work.

"There's no time for me to be a kid."

She was surprised when she felt a finger gently nudging her chin up.

"Even grown-ups need time to be a kid," he said, grin softening to a small smile. "Your family will be just fine. With someone like you watching over them, how can things turn out otherwise? I believe in you."

Her cheeks burned. And she wanted to cry. But she also felt better than she had in a long time.

"Thanks, Iruka-sensei. I'll... I'll go now. Osaka-chan and Sakaki-chan are probly wondering where I am."


	16. After School Funk

The hospital again, to where she was still in recovery. Physically, nothing was visibly wrong with her except for a few bruises.

Mentally, she had a long way to go, to reconcile the huge chunks of empty time left behind by his memory manipulation and that of his Bro's.

And then there was the damage to her chakra coils. Nothing permanent, but it would be a month before she recovered fully. He and his Bro may not have known much about seals, but they knew everything about the body and chakra coils and energy manipulation, and Orochimaru's seal was just a trick of energy manipulation. But getting it off had involved quite a bit of inspired work with the system of power points throughout her body, some of it connected directly to her mind.

"Knock knock! A tall handsome stranger's got flowers for you!"

Anko giggled. It was a sound he hadn't heard in years.

"Come in then!"

Iruka set the flowers at her bedside. Lilies. Just a bit on the wilted side because he'd sort of forgotten to take care of them during classes, but still acceptable, he thought. Well, they really looked a little shitty. Maybe he should go get better flowers...

As he was turning away, her hand caught his.

"I can't believe this is you, Oni. You're so big! Actually," and then she let go and sat up and looked down at herself, smiling in delight as she bounced just a bit and watched her breasts shifting under the hospital gown, "actually, I can't believe this is me, either. No more Flat-Chest Mitarashi!"

She was going to make him cross-eyed, doing that.

"Ah, please stop that, Anko-chan."

Anko sank back against her pillows and sighed.

"So, I've been told a bunch of things. Some of them make sense, and some of them don't."

He had been expecting it.

"Oni, why can't I remember being apprenticed to Orochimaru? And... there's so much stuff, blurry images. And things that are just gone. I know in my head - I can remember the skills, I can remember all these fights at your side in ANBU. But I don't remember what they were about anymore. They tell me it's because of Orochimaru controlling me using some kind of cursed seal. But that's not it, is it?"

"...No, it's not."

He was totally wretched. This was the best he could do for her? If only he had trained harder, if only he had noticed all the clues about her sooner.

"Oni, look at me."

So Iruka did.

"You and your Bro erased my memories, huh?"

Iruka swallowed. Stupid dry throat. Maybe a few more beers before going to the hospital would have been a good idea.

"Yeah."

"I'm not stupid," and she looked somehow relieved, which he did not expect. "I remember picking up a lot of rumors about what your Fist of the North Star can do, not just for killing."

He had been waiting for her to tear into him. To throw the glass of water next to her at his face.

"No, you're not stupid."

"I haven't had much to do but think things through. I knew you and Eikichi-san had to be the ones to do it. But you had to have a reason to do it. Which means... which means, I did know what Orochimaru was doing with those people."

Iruka sagged in his chair. "Yeah, you did. You weren't under mind-control. You knew exactly what you were doing, fighting me and the recovery teams to help Orochimaru escape."

He did not add that she had killed at least three chuunin and a jounin before he had found her. That was another detail he had erased from her mind.

She sighed. "I see. I must have gotten really stupid the last few years, huh?"

"Aren't you... aren't you mad?"

Now she threw the water at him.

"Idiot. I'd be getting tortured right now. Maybe I'd already be executed, if you hadn't done that."

Wiping at his face, Iruka said, "You... you look good, Anko-chan." And he meant it.

Her face was still yellow and purple on one side, her split lip still healing, injuries from her battle with the first squad that had found her. But the tightness around her eyes as the years of killing had gone by, it was gone. The murky shadows of her eyes had faded, and he could see the young girl he had taken the chuunin exam with.

Again, he consciously ignored the memories of their comrades she had killed before he got there.

"You know. All these years have gone by and even with the holes in my thoughts, I'm pretty sure you still owe me a date."

Oops. Maybe they could have done just a bit more memory management.

"Eh, hehe. Maybe so."

"After I get out of here then. I want to see how clothes look on me with these awesome boobs! Geez, Oni, they're like, so much bigger than when we took the Chuunin Exam, aren't they? Don't you think they're rocking?"

Aaakh!

"PLEASE put those away! Gah. Put your gown down. Don't fondle yourself in front of me! Shit, what if Kurenai walks in and sees me gawking at your boobs? She'll kill us! Me first."

"Hehe. Why so shy? Ooooo. Are you STILL a virgin, Oni? Nyahaha! You are! After all those years of strip clubs and porn and stuff and you still haven't done the - "

"I've been training! And there were all these missions! And... I want it to be with the right girl!"

"Hah. I bet one day, I'll just have to drug you and have my way with you."

They sat quietly for a while, just grinning at each other. For him, he had his pal back. He wondered what it was really like for Anko. Was it like she had lost time? Hadn't he basically mind-fucked her? But maybe it was okay... because it almost seemed like she'd just had the clock turned back in some ways. And she was smiling at him, and it was easy and relaxed and the years in between before and now did not seem quite as many as they had just days before, when it seemed like there was nothing to life but violence and blood and lies and subterfuge and maintaining cover and hunting and everything.

"You didn't take anything from me, Oni," she said quietly. "You freed me from experiences that turned me into somebody who would help a killer carve up and mutilate people to get his jollies. Maybe the person I'd become would resent you, but I'm not her."

Noticed the clock. He did have another obligation today.

"Yeah, yeah," she waved him off after an awkward, heartfelt hug that left them both pink in the cheeks, "you gotta go. Anyway, you know. Thank you. For not killing me and... for giving me another chance."

Now from the military hospital to Lee's house.

He was going to be late to the Dojo at this rate, so he flew from rooftop to rooftop, flipping over fences, bouncing from wall to wall up and down, clambering over the walls at speed.

Konoha had gotten really huge. It had overflowed past the boundaries of its old walls, and five years ago, had spread beyond the newer set of walls. A third set of walls was still being constructed thirty miles beyond the second ring - it would encompass a huge area of ground, many more square miles of forest, most of the neighboring farms, and also allow a generous margin of expansion.

There was a real difference in the construction within the heart of the city, the area between the first and second walls, and the area beyond. In the old city, the buildings were mostly low, constructed of wood and brick and mortar. The buildings beyond that gradually and steadily became taller and newer as one proceeded further out, built as trade had been expanded with distant nations through improved transport and peace. More and more steel, concrete and glass became available, but still numerous trees and small parks and squares of greenery and gardens were scattered among them, because this was still Konoha, and if it was Hidden no longer, in fact, not even legitimately a Village any longer, it was a City among the Leaves.

From the directions he'd gotten off the school secretary, Lee lived in that area beyond the second ring. Ten years ago, there was nothing in that area except for abandoned farms and a handful of empty buildings. Now it was a thriving commercial area, the center for shopping for reclaimed technology, high end hand-crafted things, and a new technical school for civilians. This far out from the center of Konoha, buildings were exempt from the laws limiting the structures, and a single tower rose high above the tree line, a gleaming structure of stone and steel entwined with living trees growing through the pillars and glass.

This tower's first seven floors were occupied by banks and accounting offices, the next three floors were taken up by a high class recreational facility, a gym with a pool and a number of classy restaurants where one meal would eat up a month of Iruka's teaching salary. And the top ten floors all belonged to one family.

That was Lee's home, Rock City, the residence of the richest family in the Nation of Fire.

This visit would be very short. He still had to make it to the Dojo to assist Bro with the advanced classes.

Swanky lobby. Shining white marble, lots of polished bronze and brass fittings, obsidian trimmings on a mixture of oil lamps for warmth and white electric bulbs for efficiency. And always, growing trees growing through the floors and the walls. Civilian guards. A couple of Hyuuga chuunin for extra security. Up an elevator. Awesome! There was just something cool about elevators. It was just cool feeling his stomach sort of sink during the initial acceleration up.

It reminded him of riding the hawk during the chuunin exam. Maybe he should look into getting a summon?

A pretty woman maybe a few years older than Iruka opened the big oak double doors.

"The young sir told me not to let you in. But you know, I don't work for him yet, and I think his father would want you to give him a talking to. He hasn't left that room since the first day of school."

Through a couple of hallways, and Iruka had to fight the urge to look around at all the shiny, neat stuff around him.

"This it?"

"Yes, Onizuka-sensei. There will be tea for you in the receiving room."

"Oh, sorry, I can't stay. I'm just here to deliver a message. I still have things to do."

Then she gave him a disapproving look that made him feel about ten years younger, but hey, it was one of the hazards of the job.

A short trip indeed.

He flung open the door, picked up Lee by the back of his shirt, lifted him up from the floor and away from his video game, and dropped him unceremoniously into a chair.

Turned his back on Lee, looked at all the neat stuff in the room. And out the window, a magnificent view.

Man, even the chair looked ten times as comfortable as what he could afford on his teaching salary. Well, he did have all those savings from all those missions... maybe he could splurge on a better bed, and maybe a better chair at the Academy.

"Sensei, I think I'm gonna quit."

Eyes still roving around, Iruka answered, "That's up to you. I'll write you out of the roster of students myself if you aren't back in class tomorrow."

"...You're not going to talk me out of it?"

He sighed, finally looking directly at his student.

"Kid, there are plenty of brats who want to become ninja and shouldn't be, and plenty who aren't ninja but could be. It's not up to me to decide what the little twerps want. It's only up to me to do what I can to turn out the best ninja I can. So if you come in tomorrow, I'll also expect you to do some extra work by coming to the Onizuka Dojo after class, and learning Raging Demon style."

"...No matter how hard I practice taijutsu, as soon as chakra comes into it, I'm just not strong or fast enough."

Gloom did not suit this brat. It made him quiet. It turned him inwards. It pushed Iruka's resolve, added to his judgement that this was the correct course of action.

"Two things. Okay? Listen to me very carefully. I won't repeat it. Actually, three things."

Lee let go of the game controller, which fell from his limp hands, banged on the wooden floor. He stopped looking at the images on the TV, and turned to look at the giant looking down at him.

"First. There are things you can learn that can allow you to surpass most ninja, even if you never manage to properly channel chakra. There were ninja ages before we ever understood chakra. Partly, learning Raging Demon with your three girl friends can bring you that strength, and mostly, knowledge and tactics alone can make you a better ninja than one that is totally reliant on chakra-based techniques."

Iruka crouched down so that their faces were level and continued. "Second, and this is something you have to think about very carefully. Nod if you're really hearing me, Lee-san."

The boy nodded, his indifferent doll's expression taking on the aspect of curiosity.

"Wait a moment then, alright? I'm going to examine you. You just sit there and keep quiet."

Iruka closed his eyes, and his fingers were surrounded with pale white light. He probed carefully at several spots around Lee's abdomen, along his spine, and the back of his skull.

"Yes, it's like I thought. Now, you listening to me, brat?"

"I said I would."

"Just like the medic-ninja detailed in your file, there's nothing wrong with your inner coils."

Iruka was losing him again. The boy was reaching for the controller, his eyes fading back to the screen.

"But I know what's wrong, and I can fix it."

The boy went still, very still.

Iruka told him that the problem was in his brain. There was a difference in the way his brain was wired - it kept him from connecting the symbolic gestures of the mudra hand-seals with the abstract concept of flowing his chakra in certain ways. It was also the reason he was uncontrollably loud.

"I'm not loud! I'm quiet all the time!"

"...Right, gotcha, kid. But you get it? There's a place in your brain affects how you imagine things and how you match up symbols and meaning. Yours is a little different, that's all."

The boy drooped into himself, perked up again.

"You said you can fix me?"

"Lee, this is a very important decision for you. It's something you need to talk over with your father. In order to allow you to use chakra the way the other students do, I'd have to operate on your brain. I would take these fingers," Iruka pulled a kunai from a hidden pouch in his slacks with his right hand and kept his eyes right on Lee's as his left fingers pushed into the cold steel blade and sliced through the hardened metal of Konoha's new foundries as though it was clay instead, "and make a cut through your skull."

Then Iruka opened his right hand palm up, and directed touki through his flesh, floating the ruined weapon in the air between them, the two halves hovering, slowly drifting apart.

"Then I would use energy to move the lobes of your brain just a bit. With this same energy, I would make a cut deep inside your brain."

"And then... then I'd be fixed?"

Iruka nodded.

"But... brain surgery. I wouldn't be myself anymore, would I?"

"Your personality would change. You wouldn't lose any memories. That great talent of yours for math though, that might be diminished, as would your ability to assume absolute and total concentration on one task at a time. You might see things in different ways, feel differently about things, you might even taste things differently."

The boy pulled his legs in with his arms and curled up tightly. He vibrated in place there, rocking just slightly back and forth on his bed.

Iruka got up and started to walk out.

"What was the third thing, sensei?"

"Whuzzat? Oh yeah. You have an awesome collection of games. I didn't think some of these were even out yet."

"Preview copies."

"...Can I borrow this one?"

"...Sure."

Iruka closed the door behind him, sure he had done the right thing. And gleefully clutching at a little plastic package with a number of scantily clad girls on the cover, fighting. The boy was too young for this game anyway.


	17. Later

Osaka slid through life like one of her knives.

Sometimes, she cut smoothly and cleanly, and time slid by with a whisper. Sometimes, she idled along and would get caught in a snarl of tougher material that took more work to cut through. And sometimes, there were the long slow days of cleaning and sharpening required to allow her to keep on slicing. Before her friends, life blurred by her, as she got by with as little thought and effort as possible. Everything had been dull and boring, and it was just easier to fade out.

Life slowed down so much since they got their new teacher. It felt like she was having to struggle to chop and then grind down the edge all the time.

It was good. Last year, she got real friends. This year, a new teacher. New things could be terribly boring, but lately, there had been so many nice new things to pay attention to.

Outside the window, it was hot and bright and lovely. She wanted an ice cream. But she always had a tough time buying things alone - she always forgot to bring enough money. And when she did bring enough, she often gave too much.

It was good that she had friends now to look after her.

"Osaka-chan! Hey. So, how do you think you did on the exam?"

That silly Lee boy.

"Smooth. Like butter."

"Uh. Okay, that's good, right?"

Then extra-cute little Chiyo-chan was tugging on her hand. Osaka still found herself having to keep away thoughts of the pigtails controlling Chiyo-chan's mind.

"Osaka-chan, did you remember to write your name down on the paper?"

Outside, a hot breeze was playing music with the leaves of the trees. In the now, she slowed down her thoughts and concentrated.

"I think so."

Osaka let Chiyo-chan pull her along. She resisted another of her frequent urges when with Chiyo-chan: the urge to play with the much smaller girl's pigtails. She fell into an idle haze as the three of them walked together. She thought of Lee's eyebrows wiggling and growing so big that he could fly through the air with them.

"You should have signed up."

"Ice cream!" Osaka murmured. "You should fly over to the cafeteria and get me some, Lee."

"Um. Osaka-chan?" Lee asked. "I meant the exhibition matches today. You should have joined. You and Sakaki are amazing."

Hrmm. Osaka did like fighting sometimes, especially with the boys at the Onizuka Dojo. They were really friendly. They had actually shown her some new tricks with knives, and that was just really cool.

"Didn't feel like it," Osaka said simply.

Chiyo-chan chirped, "How come you didn't sign up, Lee?"

"I got a lot better this year, but I don't need to beat Neji anymore. Not now that I know there're others so much stronger. I don't need to show off."

Osaka frowned. "Sakaki-chan doesn't show off."

Lee turned red. And blurted out a jumbled confusion of words involving self-denial, proper behavior, goals, doing the right thing, trying to be a better person, like his secret crush.

Silly boy! Did he really think no one knew about his feelings?

...But if he could fly, then he could fly out of his apartment window in the middle of the night and leave chocolates on Sakaki's doorstep. That would be really cool.

Osaka wondered: given the choice of her own normal eyebrows and giant eyebrows that allowed flight, what would she pick? It was a real dilemma.

She forced herself to slide back and pay attention. Lee had lost that look he sometimes had when his mouth wasn't really his own, and was back to talking sense.

"I didn't mean her at all. I know she has to sign up. She's expected to, coz she moved into the number one spot this year. I meant... I meant me."

And then she saw the cones, topped with smooth, creamy perfection, dotted with chunks of fruit.

"Ice cream! With berries!"

She was already leaning hard towards the approaching students licking their ice creams.

"No, Osaka-chan! We'll get you some later. After Sakaki's match, okay?" Chiyo-chan grabbed her arm to hold her back from the now alarmed-looking pair. Students a year below them, from the looks of it. A pink-haired girl and a blonde.

"Her hair is pink! Hee hee. Pretty..." Flash of steel in her fingers.

"No, Osaka-chan! Put away the knife. Sensei won't appreciate you scaring the younger students."

"Aww."

Osaka reached feebly towards the wide-eyed pair, who were now backing away very slowly. The blade vibrated in the air, the point darting hypnotically in random paths before her, moving so quickly her hand and the knife in it seemed to vanish and reappear in different positions.

"Don't mind her," Lee said. "She's really very friendly."

At this point, both Lee and Chiyo-chan were struggling to keep Osaka from lurching towards the two. Osaka didn't look it, but she did take pride in how her strength had improved so much at the Dojo. Her hair lifted away from her face, her nostrils flared, and her white blouse suddenly clung a lot tighter around her. She felt hyped up, like she did after a couple bags of candy. She grinned, straightened, and the weight of Lee on her back and Chiyo-chan at her legs was like that of little birds.

"Piiiiink!"

Osaka gleefully took another step while her friends' shoes squeaked as they slid along the tile floor.

The two turned around and ran.

"Hee hee! Weren't they cute, Chiyo-chan?"

She put away her knife, and released that tight focus that gave her so much power. There was some fancy name for it, but she couldn't remember it all the time.

Her two friends let go of her and sighed.

"Dragon's Breathing. You and Sakaki-chan do it so easily, Osaka-san," Lee said. "That's a move that only the top students at the Dojo can do and they've been at it for twenty years!"

"Mm? It's easy. You and Chiyo-chan just need to eat more veggies. You'll get it before you graduate. I eat lots of veggies."

"I really hope so," Chiyo-chan said. "It would make up a lot for my being small."

"And I need it too. Can still barely use chakra."

Chiyo-chan looked up at Lee. "Lee... do you regret it sometimes? You're in the top ten now, and if you could just use chakra normally..."

"I just need to train harder, study harder, meditate more intensely!" he exclaimed. "This is the real me. I don't... I don't want to be someone else just to be what other people say a ninja's got to be."

The littlest Academy student sighed again, drooped. Did even her pigtails droop?

"It's just," she whispered, "everything's so tough."

Osaka slung one arm around Lee's shoulders and put her left hand on Chiyo-chan's head.

"Ice cream happens eventually," Osaka intoned with great gravity. "Even if it starts out looking like ordinary milk and stuff."

They were moving again, and at least the shadows on her friends' faces had lifted at her words, even if they still weren't getting her ice cream yet.

She decided that it just wasn't worth flying for a girl to have Lee's eyebrows. Now if they were pigtails like Chiyo-chan's...


	18. Jealousy

It was the way it was, he thought.

Or maybe not, since the way things were today were drastically different from how he'd thought they'd be.

Between Neji and his opponent, that lumbering blond irritant was smirking.

"Now for our main event! I hope you parents haven't gotten nervous what with the explosions and knives so far today," Iruka called out to the surrounding audience in their seats around the sparring circle. "Because these two might be the best students the Academy has ever had."

Under his breath, Neji muttered, "It should be just me..."

"Our top students this year, Sakaki, the last of her clan, or should I say, the first of a new clan here in Konoha - and Hyuuga Neji, the best prodigy of the Hyuuga of this generation!"

The applause for Neji was thunderous, but only a handful clapped at the mention of Sakaki.

Most of the parents eyed her warily. The small crowd could be heard murmuring as they looked wiltingly at her, some of them talking about killers from Iwa.

They were gathered in a tight circle around an area marked off with with chalk lines. At the western edge of the clearing, cypress trees swayed with the occasional wind, revealing one of the wings of the Academy central building, and to the east, the earth rose into a low hill and then into the massive rock face of Konoha's monument to its Kage.

Idiots, thought Neji. She was from Iwa but her family had not even been ninja. He'd heard about them on the news years before, when he wasn't even in the Academy yet. They had tried to reform Iwa and failed. Forced to escape because of political persecution, and she was the only survivor... and it burned him how good she was.

In academic tests, she scored nearly as high as the genius, Mihama Chiyo. In taijutsu, even before she started learning the Onizuka's Raging Demon style, her form had always been flawless. In tests of physical conditioning, her stamina was outstanding. Everything seemed to come naturally to her.

And she had started out so much older than the other students. She should not have been able to pick up chakra use so quickly. She did everything so damned well. She only needed to see a ninjutsu technique once to have an idea of how it worked, and half the time, she could figure out how to do something she saw with barely any help from the teachers! Some of the more suspicious fools thought she was probably a chuunin spy from Iwa..

This year, she was ranked at the top.

Neji did not think of himself as being obsessed with meaningless things like Academy ranking, but for himself, a member of the Hyuuga clan, to be second to a too-old, too-tall girl from a family of useless politicians?

As Iruka-sensei blabbed some more about them to the audience, Neji noted the not-so-casual observers. Aside from the parents of the other students, there were representatives from all the top clans. A handful of jounin whose interest could only be in this damned girl, since they certainly wouldn't give a crap for a Branch Family over-achiever...

"I won't hold back, Sakaki-san," Neji hissed. "You have no chance. You..."

She said nothing, wasn't even paying attention. She was waving at her useless friends, that Mihama girl, the strange and disturbed Kasuga, and that completely hopeless Lee, whom Neji had heard had actually turned down their Sensei's offer to fix his problems with chakra techniques.

How could she be so damned light-hearted? Didn't she realize all the people that really mattered were judging her, wanting for her to lose?

"Okay, enough ring talk! Let's get it on!" yelled their instructor, who back-flipped out of the fifty-foot ring with a single leap.

She was still waving at that useless bunch.

"Byakugan!"

His eyes burned as chakra flooded them. He could see everything. He could not quite see the individual opening points yet, but he was close - he saw the blurry glow of specific areas where the points were clustered. He could not close them all the time, not yet, but even with only a sixty percent success rate, he could shut down anyone. And of course, he could already do the less accurate attacks that simply damaged the tissues beneath the point of impact with a burst of chakra.

Like all Hyuuga, he could not comprehend how the Oni-Baku and his heir could possibly manipulate the opening points without being able to see them, and to do so with more control in addition. From his blurry memories of witnessing Iruka-sensei's chuunin exam finals, the Fist of the North Star could do incredible things with manipulating the points - not just damage, but fine control over another human's bodily processes.

Neji promised himself that he would be the one to unravel the secrets of that Art. Then they would all dread the power of the Branch House.

But for now, there was this fight.

Through his enhanced vision, his foe looked even more imposing, which he hated. Only three years older, she was nearly a foot taller than him and he was the tallest boy in their class. He could see the perfect conditioning of her muscles - loose and wiry, with still enough of a sheath of fat that she had plenty of stamina in reserve but not enough to slow her down. Graceful neck that widened into broad shoulders, a trim waist, acrobat's legs, a fighter's hard hands with calluses on the knuckles and the edges and the heel of the palm and the fingertips. Long, dense bones that gave her a lot of reach with kicks and punches and the flexibility and toughness to stand up to the abuse of powerful hits.

He had no illusions about overpowering her with just strength - she had more muscle than he did at this point, period.

It did not matter. He was Hyuuga!

Neji raced forward, feet gliding over the hot dusty soil. He'd make her bleed. He'd hurt her bad enough to delay her from the next year!


	19. Another Day

Her friends were watching her. He was watching her.

Sakaki felt a little embarrassed with the eyes of so many on her. She hid it behind what she hoped was a placid, unconcerned look.

Really, she wished she could shrink down to Chiyo-chan's size and merely be cute and non-threatening.

Instead, she was taller than half the teachers, everyone other than her friends seemed to think she was scary, and most mortifying of all, she had bigger breasts than a majority of the adult women in Konoha.

Today, though, was not the time to hide. She had to be strong. Her friends needed for her to win. She could see it in their faces. She didn't care about the match herself, but they'd hate it if she didn't. She had to be what her friends hoped to be, formidable and imposing. She was what they wanted to be, she couldn't let them down.

So no baggy clothes today, no slouching to reduce her height.

Sakaki wore tough, extra thick jeans given by Osaka-chan... which ought to have been comfortable from what she remembered of trying them on a few months ago but instead were a little too snug, especially around her hips and butt, and it wasn't as long as she'd thought either, just reaching her ankles instead of pooling in folds atop her shoes. She hoped that didn't mean she was having another growth spurt so soon. The dark blue material seemed to be painted on, which was, again, embarrassing. For her top, she wore a black, sleeveless vest of boiled leather given by Lee with a night-blue tank top and grey sports bra beneath that.

Oh! She hoped she wasn't blushing, only now realizing that she was showing quite a bit of cleavage.

A gift from Eikichi-sensei: fingerless leather gloves that went up to her elbows with steel caps over the knuckles, and rows of steel strips contoured to her muscles that allowed full wrist movement but protected the backs of her hands, wrists and the lateral surfaces of her forearms.

Plain white sneakers for her feet. A light blue ribbon kept her hair tied back from her face. It and her pony tail blew back from her face in the soft breeze, and she felt uncharacteristically pretty today.

She was not lost in thought, but she did frown at how suddenly Neji attacked. Not even time for bows of mutual respect and such. Rude.

Neji was already charging at her, eyes blazing with that eerie Hyuuga-crazy look, and she was still wondering if she ought to just pull out - except her mind kept supplying her images of how disappointed Lee and Osaka-chan would look and how teary-eyed Chiyo-chan would be. And of course... her father would have wanted her to win this, because she was all that was left of their family.

To say nothing of Eikichi-sensei, who really wanted her to show off what Raging Demon could do. Everyone knew the Fist of the North Star was powerful at this point, but they also knew that it was only passed down to one person at a time... so there were still not quite enough students for his Dojo yet.

While she was distracted though, she was not unaware. Neji's glowing palm was only two inches from the center of her chest. A killing strike.

Sakaki did not notice how, with that observation, her mouth pressed into a thin, tight line, and her eyes turned grim, remorseless - the same expression she'd had as the demon-masked ANBU had massacred her enemies for her.

Her hand moved, faster than she herself could see. Her fingers were steel bands closed around his wrist. She stopped all his forward momentum so quickly, he lost his footing. Her feet, planted and held to the ground with chakra, didn't even budge.

Quietly, she said, "That's not gentlemanly, Neji-san."

He didn't understand death, hadn't really seen it up close, hadn't had his face splattered with blood, had never gotten the scent of shit and piss and blood up his nose. Sure, he'd lost his father. But he hadn't seen it happen. He didn't understand what killing was.

And... Come on! It probably looked to everyone like his hand was stopped just short of touching between her breasts. That actually made her angrier than the whole attempting to kill with a hit thing.

Drawing attention to her breasts really pissed her off.

Neji was hooking his free hand around in a looping strike for her ribs when she simply stepped forward, causing his attack to overshoot her side and glance off the stiff leather in a bright glowing flare of chakra.

Everyone at school whom Neji sparred with either tried to fight at range, used hit and run tactics, or simply surrendered to the futility of trying to outstrike the Jyuuken. And all the Hyuuga he trained with only used the same hand-to-hand style as he did, reliant on circular parries and evasion and straight strikes with fingers and palms. It made his movements predictable.

"You're just a little boy," she hissed, as her long legs powered her into him, body to body, and her right arm slid under his left into an underhook.

Backpedaling, Neji jerked his right hand into a spiraling arc that made her release that wrist.

He twisted that hand about, quick and deft as a hummingbird in flight, and tapped her left - there was no power behind the blow, but his chakra burned into her hand, which spasmed uncontrollably.

Was that a smile of triumph? What an ass!

Neji's feet slid along the ground as he tried to spin out of her path, put himself off-line so he could strike at her open side.

The underhook helped Sakaki read the movement of his torso against hers, and she kept up. She turned her whole body to her right, power traveling up from her feet, from her hips, from her waist, still pushing forward with her long legs, and slammed her left elbow into his gut with all her weight behind it.

That first blow, he had still been able to channel chakra there, hardening the abdominals and reducing the damage.

The second blow a moment after caused him to bite his lip.

Neji did not look cool and reserved and contemptuous anymore when the third blow sank deep and bent him over, gasping.

She ignored his weakening counter-attacks even as she continued throwing the hard, bony point forward in short, powerful arcs.

Half of his attacks were not hitting tenketsu, just causing light bruising under the skin. The few significant hits: the taps that did strike true on the opening points about her extensor carpi muscles on the forearm and the brachioradialis on the inner side of her upper arm took out her ability to flex the forearm and extend or abduct her left hand, but so what? He had already taken out that hand, all he was doing was minor, redundant damage. That didn't slow down her elbow a bit.

Meanwhile, she was taking out Neji's breathing, his core. Jyuuken required perfect precision and intense concentration... and the brat had probably never needed to concentrate while unable to breathe smoothly before.

One more elbow in his right side finally caught the cluster of nerves she had been aiming for all along, and his eyes teared up as pain radiated all the way up his torso and along his arm.

That was the opening Sakaki needed. Her left arm darted under his armpit to get the other underhook. And she pumped her legs harder.

As Chiyo-chan had suspected, the guy did not know what to do at all in a clinch.

They slammed together, chest to chest. She felt Neji's arms around her flailing about, desperately trying to strike at the tenketsu on her back through the leather. He had never conceived of the possibility of having to perform attacks from this position, and he was missing all her opening points.

Sakaki did not notice that she roared as she continued into the charge.

It was a position that looked intimate. Faces were close, bodies tight against each other. But there was nothing gentle or affectionate about it.

She recalled doing this move over and over in Eikichi-sensei's overheated Dojo, against heavy men who knew exactly how to counter it - by either breaking her underhooks or going for overhooks or sprawling to stay upright. And she hadn't been allowed to use chakra either. It was all strength and form, balance and technique.

All these smelly, sweaty, smiling older guys, working with her skills and strength. She could kinda, sorta feel that vibe that nearly all of them were either fond of her or outright crushing on her, but that never stopped them from hooking a leg behind hers and slamming her hard on her butt or flinging her around like a rag doll. Or trying to hit her in the face with an elbow.

Hours spent day after day over months, lifting, carrying, throwing, punching and kicking guys who ranged from slightly heavier than her to twice her body weight. Grappling, arm locks, leg locks, ankle locks, wrist locks, finger locks, choke holds, face gouges, fish-hooking, elbows, knees, clawing at ears, striking for the crotch, the throat, the base of the skull where it met the spine, the kidneys...

And more knowledge of anatomy crammed in than she had ever thought could possibly be required just to know where and how to hurt a person.

She had gotten more than a few black eyes, busted lips and bloody noses. There is nothing quite like the first time a girl finds out that the stabbing pain in her inner thigh is called a pulled groin. She actually got more injured than in her encounters with that over-sized stray cat in the alley close to her apartment, which was saying something.

It was a testament to Eikichi-sensei's skill that the Dojo's students weren't in the hospital all the time. He spent half an hour after every class just using his healing skills on the worse injuries his students acquired that day.

Time was still going forward, but she didn't have to think about what she was doing at all. Her body was taking care of all the movements - the beauty of muscle memory.

Her thoughts still drifted along, to the first few weeks when Chiyo-chan and Osaka-chan and Lee spent hours just hitting heavy punching bags to toughen up their hands and feet and elbows and knees and shins, while she was already doing painful makiwara-work. Skinned, bloody knuckles, bad bruises, deep lacerations, and always, afterwards, Iruka-sensei, bathing her hands to clean them, disinfecting the wounds with chemical antiseptics and healing chakra.

With leverage and momentum and perfect technique honed by mindless repetition, she tore Neji off his feet with a twist of her hips, and her calves and quads tightened explosively fast as she threw them both forward into the air. Tightening her grip, kicking out with her legs to add spin to the takedown, she slammed Neji into the ground with all her weight on top.

It was even easier than when she practiced at the Dojo - Neji was practically a cute little dolly compared to those guys.

She almost giggled at the thought of a chibi-Neji doll, long hair actually shinier and prettier than her own, with an assortment of nifty clothes to choose from.

Focus, girl. Osaka-chan was infecting her with daydream-itis. Plenty of time for that later.

The little breath he had left after the elbows went out of him when his back hit the ground. His head bounced limply, and the light from his pale eyes glazed over. He lost the concentration required to maintain his doujutsu. He had not even been able to cushion the impact by flowing chakra along his spine. Because of the off-center landing, she guessed that he'd cracked one or two ribs.

Maybe, he had been shocked that she'd not only closed with him but closed past the range where striking with full length arm extension was impossible. She had noticed the way he had eyed her long legs and arms - he'd probably thought she was going to try to use her several inches of reach advantage to dance around and strike with him. She was quite sure nobody had ever tried to wrestle him before - everyone was afraid of those fast, incapacitating jyuuken hits.

As she reared back from him, raising her torso away and flinging her leg over to straddle his belly in a full mount, Neji was still trying to hit her with glowing strikes - blindly, without the direction of the Byakugan.

All the while, she pounded his weakening defense. It burned and bruised when she felt his fingers and palms land on her thighs, on her shoulder, her upper arms - but he wasn't doing nearly as much damage as she was doing just pummeling down at him with very simple chops and punches (with her still functioning right fist) and elbows. Her weight was making it tough for him to regain any breath at all, and she knew from experience how hard it was to strike upwards while somebody bigger was on top of you.

Unable to hit opening points anymore, his glowing palm clapped against her right shoulder again, just causing another bruise. While his right arm was extended, she twisted her left arm through and used the forearm to shove his left arm just a bit higher, and shot a straight right punch into his chin.

Her knuckles mashed his lips, and through them, felt her bones knock against his teeth, and she saw blood splatter out. His mouth looked worse than it really was, but every bit of damage was taking a lot out of his smaller body.

Then more elbows and forearms, more punching, and his attempts at grabbing at her wrists became more and more harried, the movements less crisp, his hands sliding on the sweat-slicked material of her long gloves.

The exchange was tilting further and further in her favor. His forearms were getting badly bruised and soon his slaps and knife hands had no chakra behind them at all.

And then, damn it, he got her right on the left breast! Two fingers thrust deep right under her nipple!

He was so dead.

Sakaki's hair whipped back from her face, burst out of the ribbon as though a storm formed around her. Her nostrils flared, her mouth pulled back into a snarl, and all her skeletal muscles bulged out, full of blood and the primal force of the Art of Dragon's Breathing.

The deep tissue bruises from the near-misses and the few that had connected fully resulting in closed points and pooling blood under the skin stopped hurting as she accessed the parts of her brain that let her use all her current physical potential.

Lightning coursed along her nerves, fired her blood as the world became more vivid and her body's energy stores were released at a higher gear.

The expansion of her chest cavity for greater breathing capacity and the way her thickened pectorals lifted her boobs actually caused the buttons down the front of her vest to pop off. Her tank top was suddenly stretched tight over her boobs, across her rippling abs. And the seams down the sides of her jeans creaked alarmingly, like they were about to rip open.

Neji was opening his mouth and he just had this _look_ and Sakaki knew he was about to start talking about fate and destiny and crap like that.

"Oh just shut up you creep!"

She dropped a forearm on his face. He tried to block with his arms crossed over his head but she blasted right through, his bruised limbs flung out of alignment by the force. With her stomach tightening to add power and some twist as she turned into it, the steel arm-guard fractured his cheekbone and jaw and the weight behind also pushed his skull into the earth beneath.

She raised her arm and prepared to do it again, but she could see that he was completely out. His body was limp, and he had stopped trying to buck her out of position.

Sakaki thought about smacking him around some more anyway, immediately felt guilty about that. Actually... maybe she'd been too rough on him. He hadn't been trying to perv on her after all, he was just an idiot.

"Ahem," Iruka-sensei called out. "I think that's a knock-out, Sakaki-chan. Err. Let's let the medics do their thing, eh?"

Sakaki released the technique and sighed in relief as she got up off of Neji and examined the damage to her wardrobe. At least she hadn't lost her pants.

Chiyo-chan and Osaka-chan were cheering wildly for her, the other students in their year seemed a bit subdued, and the adult audience seemed sort of stunned by how quickly it had been over. And... oh dear... Lee's face was totally red and looking away from her.

With that, Iruka-sensei went into his extremely brief post-fight speech and concluded with, "Go on and enjoy your summer!"

"Hee hee, what a great way to end the year, huh?" Chiyo-chan said.

"It was... really embarrassing," Sakaki said, looking at her feet and, well, seeing her boobs, which nearly blocked the view. "And maybe I overdid it."

"It was awesome!" the little girl exclaimed as she jumped straight in and Sakaki had to catch her. "You did just fantastic, Sakaki-chan! I wish I could be like you already."

"Oof! Hey, Chiyo-chan... I have some closed tenketsu and a lot of bruises you know."

"You're fine. Hey, put me on your shoulders."

"...Maybe later. I'm going to have a lot of aches."

"Oh all right. Eww, hey, you still have his blood on your gloves! Down then, please."

The real reason Sakaki put the oh-so-cutely pouting Chiyo-chan down was that she wanted both hands free to hold the flaps of her vest closed.

Honestly, Sakaki often wished she could be as flat as Osaka-chan. When her spacey friend did the Dragon's Breathing, she didn't have to worry about stretching out her clothes or revealing more skin than was proper.

Right now, Sakaki's top was too loose from having been stretched - and her sports bra under it had popped some seams. She pretty much had to just press her vest closed with her left hand, which was still paralyzed.

"Err, you really, uh, showed your power," Lee said, still not able to look at her straight. "Don't look at the boobs, don't look at the boobs, don't look at the boobs," he intoned softly, mumbling.

Sakaki was so embarrassed she could cry. Definitely, no using that technique again until she found clothes that wouldn't stretch too far or rip. At the Dojo, she had always done it while wearing a loose gi - she had never noticed before how much larger she got while using the technique. She really needed to figure out what to do for fighting clothes.

"Ice cream!" Osaka said, hopping up and down excitedly.

Ice cream did sound good. But first, she would go to the locker room and change to her normal clothes. Then she started to feel the dozens and dozens of really, really painful bruises on her body and she groaned. The worst was the one on her freaking boob! Ugh. She needed a long, hot soak.

Then a shadow blocked the heat of the sun against her back and a huge hand patted her head.

Sheepishly, she muttered, "Um. I overdid it, huh, Sensei?"

"Naw. You didn't kill him, right? Even that hit to your... ah, bosom... that would have put you in the hospital if he had still been able to focus chakra properly through those fingers. Woulda gone through the muscles and made your lung bleed, maybe even collapse. It was the right time to use Tenryu to finish quickly. It was a better fight than it probably looked to those dumbo parents."

She turned and kept her eyes on her feet and just knew she was blushing horribly.

"Thanks, Iruka-sensei."

"All of you did real good this year," he said to her friends.

Lee said, "You did great too, sensei!" as he gave the big man two thumbs up.

"Of course I did. I'm a genius, mwahahaha!"

Sakaki felt her self-consciousness fade and she filled up like she would explode. This year had gone by really fast. And it was the happiest she'd been since she'd still had her family in Iwa.

She was almost afraid something bad was about to happen to take it all away.

Sakaki managed to look up and watch as Chiyo-chan was trying to wheedle some advanced reading out of Iruka-sensei for the summer, Osaka-chan was still pleading for an immediate dose of ice cream, and Lee was mentioning some other games he'd just gotten that sensei could borrow.

Around them, the parents were taking the other students home.

Then, something new: some of the girls from the younger classes were looking at her with wide eyes and something suspiciously like admiration. Weird.

Then Iruka-sensei looked her in the eye and grinned in a way that made him seem like a kid.

"Oh yeah, Sakaki-chan. The outfit looks great on you! You have nothing to be shy about."

Her cheeks, which had taken some long moments to fade back to a normal color, were burning again.

"Umm... thanks, sensei."

Sakaki took a deep breath and let go of the vest. She tried not to think about the weird fluttery feeling she got at the thought that she caught a momentary flicker of sensei's eyes towards her chest. Osaka-chan and her imagination were really giving her all these badly timed thoughts!

Maybe she wouldn't change first. Maybe. She wasn't showing that much skin after all, right? Anyway, the bruises would fade, but today was only around for today.

"Okay, Osaka-chan, let's go get that ice cream."

Her friends cheered again and seeing the younger girls grinning and Lee's bashful smile while he tried so very obviously hard not to look at her body, she hoped the moment would just stretch and stretch and last...


	20. Summer Meeting

Iruka ambled down one of the side-streets off of Red Light Road. Man, Eikichi had him calling it that too...

He closed his eyes as he walked and it was a glorious feeling. The sun beat down on everything with pounding summer heat, but today, a cool wind had blown in from the distant coast and as it circled through the clear spaces between the buildings and blew dead leaves into the air and flipped up the skirts of lovelies, it also cooled some of the sweat of Iruka's brow.

"I should take the little monkeys on a field trip to the beach before the genin graduation," he said to himself, eyes still closed, sensing his way along to avoid bumping into the few pedestrians also braving the summer heat.

It was outside of Fire Country, but the brats weren't ninja yet. It ought to be pretty safe. And of course, he'd be there and bro would want to come along, and the Demon Explosion was enough heavy firepower that nobody would mess with them.

Iruka bet that most of the kids had never seen the sea.

He opened his eyes and hopped a good twenty foot leap to avoid an ox pulling a box-cart. The man leading the ox yelled something at him, but it was summer and so, you know, whatever.

As he flew over the wooden sides, he felt the temperature change and knew there was ice in there, sold by a company run by civilians that employed some retired shinobi who had stolen techniques from some place that let them make ice. They mass-produced huge amounts of ice for parties and their business was particularly brisk during the summer, when people who wanted to avoid the big bills of keeping an air conditioner running would buy a big hunk of ice, put it in a basin of water, and run an electric fan behind it. There was a layer of insulating hay in the walls of the cart, but it was not perfect, and the air around it was distinctly cooler from heat leaching into it. Also, cold water dripped down from the back.

"Mmmm, ice... Beer, beer! So cold... so good on a summer afternoon... beer! Hehe he."

He couldn't sing worth shit, but he had not become a chuunin to become a singer so that was cool.

Iruka sighed. He still had not found it though. Hard ANBU missions and death-defying feats and hopeless last stands against greater numbers of ninja had not satisfied him. And as much as he loved teaching the kids in the Ninja Academy, there was still something missing. Maybe it was just that they were too young? It was jounin that really got to mold the kids when they started becoming teenagers after all.

The thought of some perverted jounin leering at Sakaki-chan (who, being older than her classmates, at the tender age of fourteen already had an increasingly impressive bosom) ruined his mood.

Gentle Sakaki, genius little Mihama-chan, and the truly psycho Kasuga-chan... He had started planning for them to become a team as soon as he'd seen them helping out Lee together. He taught them the best he could and had even risked showing some favoritism by suggesting that they train with his big Bro Eikichi, whose Raging Demon style was perfect for covering the weaknesses of their team and for boosting some of their strengths.

"Damn. It's too late for me to try to make jounin in time to become their sensei..." He just had not thought about it, that he would only have them for one more year. There were still so many things to teach them before they'd be ready. And next year, he would be handling sections from more than one year - he wouldn't be able to give them as much attention.

What were the odds that they'd just get some indifferent mediocre asshole jounin who wouldn't care about who they really were and just wanted to make them into what the village stereotype was for what a ninja should be? They'd be ruined, or go crazy, or get killed.

Ugh, what if they got Gai? Gai would be alright for some of the other more traditional teams, but his brutal physical style would clash with that of his favorite girls.

He wished he could teach those girls the real style of Onizuka. Raging Demon was just a secondary martial art, kind of the introductory course that taught the basics prior to the Fist.

...Bro would only allow him to teach the Fist to a single heir. That was always the deal for the Divine Fist of the Big Dipper. There was only ever one Master, and only one heir... Euurgh, and how Iruka hated the name too - it sounded so mundane for a style that, really, was based around making people explode. Ugh. If people knew the real name, they'd probably think he fought with wooden pails as weapons or something.

Thinking about the rules killed his good mood. While Bro did not mind breaking rules most of the time, it seemed that the rules about the divine martial arts of the gods were unbreakable. And Bro was old and he had been nagging Iruka to take the final test for a while now.

"How can you want me to do that to you, sensei?" he whispered to himself. "And to Tomoko. She'd be devastated."

Then he hit himself in the skull with his fist. No more about that, thank you. Anyway... he might not be allowed to teach them the Hokuto Shinken, but the rules for Nanto Seiken were much more lax. He could probably sneak them some bad copies of the scrolls... He bet between the three of them, they could figure it out and get it to work. There was a lot more individualization in the Nanto styles, of which there were one hundred and eight.

Yeah, with the Southern Star, they'd be able to protect themselves... It was a perfect match for Sakaki, whose body would grow into as a good a taijutsu body as a woman's could get, and it could boost Osaka's knife skills, and the stealth part would be good for little Chiyo-chan.

He still had a problem of which jounin to rope into taking those kind-hearted girls.

Kurenai would be good if she made jounin in time, but she just refused to listen to anything he had to say. Anko would be too hard on them, just like Gai. Heck, after the trauma with the Snake's betrayal being so fresh and the revelations about those sick experiments, Anko was still in therapy half the time. The genius Kakashi? The dude was a loli-obsessed perv. Hell no.

Hrrmm... there was that guy. What was his name? He'd have to convince him to give up his special job though... how to do that? Yeah... he was a perv, but a normal, healthy, man-blooded perv. And behind those mad doctor shades, the guy hid a gentle nature.

Then Iruka saw his face reflected in the glass over the display case of one of the shops and cringed. Damn it, now he was making that twisted ugly face too! Sometimes, he wondered if he'd have picked up so many of bro's mannerisms if he had not chosen to accept the Blood of the Assassin.

Yeesh, Eikichi was still nagging him to finish going through the scrolls about that. It was terribly boring theory though, and he wondered if his understanding of the difference between chakra and Touki could reach the level well he could understand how the Blood could re-write his entire body's plan. He had received the Blood at twelve and then it was like he really was blood-related to Eikichi, as he got taller than his original genetic potential, and his bones allowed for heavier muscles, and all those subtle changes that gave him the body of one of the chosen few who carried the Blood and became as though they were assassins from birth.

It had been exhilarating. And terrifying. How could a few drops of blood change him so much? And somehow... it had given him dreams. Remnants of the memories of every other past successor to the Fist. Some of Bro's memories too, horrifying battles, the slaughter of countless fields of battle.

The final test. He would just have to put that off as long as possible, until he found an atlernative. Yeah... alternatives...

"Ebisu, that's his name."

That guy would give up his cushy spot teaching the Hokage's grandbrat if he got to learn part of the Nanto styles... probably.

Ever since Eikichi had assisted the Yondaime against the Kyuubi, quite a few ninja had wanted to learn his secrets, and all were refused. He had offered to teach them Raging Demon, but that was not what they wanted. They wanted the secret principles. They wanted Touki, and the devastating arts that used it.

It would drastically change Ebisu's stock if he was allowed to learn the mirror to Hokuto Shinken. He was just humble enough not to show off Nanto Seiken, and just ambitious enough that he could not possibly refuse something that could so greatly improve what he was as a warrior. It would lift him from his abilities as a mediocre, specialized jounin up to the strength of elites - depending on how well he figured out the theory, maybe even stronger. And he had a strong sense of responsibility to Konoha.

He probably would not turn into a power-hungry psycho. Hopefully.

Now he just needed to convince Bro to let him leak some bits of Nanto Seiken. That would suck. Iruka knew Eikichi still had nightmares about having to put away all those wandering half-taught Southern Star practitioners abusing the arts of the heavens. Those were a lot of bloody years that nobody knew about.

"Okay! It's a plan! I'll just have to... get beat up until he gives!"

Good, back to summer relaxation mode.

But then, damn it all. How could he go back to summer relaxation mode when he was walking along and sensing someone getting beat up? God damn inconsiderate people! How could you have a proper brawl during a bright summer day when it's mostly too damn hot and then there was the whole deal of bothering lots of other people who could barely think from the stupid sun in between the cool breezes running through the concrete canyons of Konoha's architecture?

It was some big dude kicking around a little kid... who somehow seemed familiar.

Somehow though... the whole situation felt familiar.

The wind had cut out and now all there was around Iruka was the stifling heat. People died in this sort of heat, he thought. Elderly people alone in their poorly ventilated apartments. Pets. Kids that suffered heatstroke and passed out somewhere nobody could find them.

"Right, it sucks to be responsible," Iruka muttered, shuffling over to the fruit stand.

"Hey, hey, that's enough, don't you think?"

"This little monster deserves... Oh, Onizuka-san? Long time no see."

The man's expression had turned all fawning. Cringing, flattering. Did he know this fat-ass?

"Uh. Yea. How ya doin?"

"Wow you look just the same. Must be that 'Hokuto Shinken' keeps you looking good, eh?"

"Right."

He was a classmate in Ninja Academy, Iruka finally recalled. Another team. Never did make it through the chuunin exam.

"So, what's all this now?"

Mr. Fats kicked about the orange boy some more.

"This creature was beating up a couple of kids selling lemonade."

"They wouldn't sell to me!"

Orange boy tried once again to scramble to his feet, but Fats kicked them out from under him again and put a big shoe (yuck, who wore that old style stuff with the two-tone stitching?) down onto the kid's chest, exerting just enough pressure to keep the breath almost fully out of him. The kid flailed ineffectually, sometimes smacking his calves and knees with slaps and clawing motions.

"You..." the kid gasped, "you better let me go... or I'll... get... dangerous..."

Idiots. The both of them. No wonder this guy retired from the ninja business. He could not even sense the beginnings of dark energy coalescing inside the boy. Almost as dense and powerful as the Touki utilized in the Hokuto Shinken. And much more foul.

Iruka cleared his throat. "Hrrm. Well, seeing as how this is one of the delinquent students at the Academy, I gotta ask you to stop now. It's a teacher's responsibility to discipline and such and such."

Fats lifted his foot, and Iruka let out a breath. The burning hot aura peaked, started to subside.

Orange boy scrambled to his feet and sort of ducked behind Iruka.

"This is one of yours? Wow. I never thought they'd let It into the Academy. And you! I never thought you'd stick to being a teacher! You were a star in the chuunin ranks! You were in ANBU! You ought to be a jounin by now."

"Yeah, well. I needed something more, or something," Iruka mumbled. Ugh. How could he be so forgetful? This guy was actually one of the few classmates that had looked up to him even when they were still in the Academy. It had felt uncomfortable even then.

Hmm. The kid was pretty good at sneaking away. Best not to let that even get started.

"Hey, hey! OWWW! Holy shit! Let go! OWWW!"

"Okay. Naruto, right? Took me a bit to remember. You cut so much class I've almost forgotten this cute face. You're in the year below the classes I handle and I know you, you're so famous. Now, we're going back to those kids, and you're gonna bow, and I'm gonna bow. And we're both gonna apologize."

"Like He- OWWW! You bastard! Let go of my eeeeear!"

Fats nodded.

"That's a good idea, Onizuka-san. Those kids belong to the Sarutobi. Except for Sandaime-sama, they're a bunch of mean assholes."

Well. That was just great.

Then Fats was laughing it up. "Holy shit! It's been almost ten years since I've seen that face of yours doing that... that thing! Hahaha! Never could decide if you looked like you had to take a dump or like if you ate natto or something!"

Ah, nuts. Why did he have to have bro's 'super-ugly' expression when he got irritated? That had to be the dumbest thing about the way passing on the Blood of the Assassin worked. It didn't just pass along the fighting traits that users acquired... it also incorporated the quirks of people. It did not merely give what came before it, it also took what was in the newer successors. He hoped that not every single Hokuto Shinken master from hereon would have bleached blond hair and good looks that turned into 'beaten with an ugly stick' expression at the drop of a hat.

Iruka sighed. "Let's go apologize, Uzumaki. Before those self-righteous gits send out some jounin to really stick it to you. See you Hiroshi. Let's get some beers sometime."

"Sure, dude. The lemonade brats are just around the corner past the pawn shop. I think you'll be impressed."

"I'm not apologizing. I just wanted... OWW! You're going to rip my ear off!"

Meh. Dragging along a little moron by his ear on a hot day was not Iruka's idea of a good time. Not even a hint of the wind returning. Sweat was pooling at the small of his back and the backs of his knees. And now he'd have to do some kissing up. Ugh!

When they stood before the the arrogant little pricks, Iruka bowed from the waist and mumbled something about asking for forgiveness for his useless student, etc. etc.

"Augh! It's that punk! Now he's back with a bigger punk!"

"Ah... hehe. I'm an instructor at the Academy and this is one of my students."

He bowed again, wondering if the orange brat appreciated this.

Naruto was just going to run but fell over with a grunt when Iruka kicked him in the back of the knee.

"He apologizes too."

But really though, Iruka felt his heart lightened at the scene. Lemonade exploded everywhere. The uppity clan darlings dripping sticky and sugary and with the heat of the sun above, it would dry into their fine-looking brand-name outfits before they could get the clothes washed. Mwahaha.

What was too much though was Naruto beating on these idiots. What the hell. They were like three years younger. The orange-clad moron was lucky that technically these guys were in the Academy too, or he'd be in real trouble.

In the end, he got them to say that they wouldn't complain about it if Iruka paid them for the lemonade they could have sold, plus extra for candy. Yeesh. Good thing they were lousy at math and did not really understand how much they were charging vs the cost of the materials they'd gotten out of the Sarutobi kitchens.

Well, to be honest, Iruka had to accept that these kids were nicer than the average Sarutobi.

"Hey brat, did you learn anything from this at all?"

Naruto was already running.

Psh, typical. He could chase him down easily, of course, but what for? He knew where the kid lived.

Next year, for sure, he would get that brat to stop cutting class. Him and the Uchiha, the two that were just too much for that wuss-face Mizuki to handle. For two boys who were so different, they sure acted alike sometimes. Never coming to class, except for the exams. Being troublesome and impudent in general.

Mizuki could not stop talking about what a pain in the ass they were. So of course, Iruka was really looking forward to having them after the summer.


	21. Great Prank

"You idiots got nothing on me! I'm the best! I'm incredible!"

He was flying from rooftop to rooftop, whipping by telephone poles he'd grab at the last moment for sudden changes in direction, bouncing from wall to wall down shadowy alleys before racing out onto crowded streets, ducking low between people and sometimes between their legs as he darted ever forwards.

Yeah, the day before, that wasn't him. Bullying little kids. What was he thinking?

Bullying was for the weak. He would not be weak. He'd be the strongest!

This was what he knew. Pranks. And the thrill of running afterwards.

Most of the time, nobody bothered to chase him. He was a bit fuzzy on the whole ranking thing, but knew that only the fastest, even among ninja, could catch him - once he had a few seconds head start. Plus, usually his pranks were small stuff, not worth wasting the time of those better ninja. Ninety percent of the time, he could get away with a stink-bomb in a grocery or a dye-bomb in a crowded plaza.

Today was one of his masterpieces. It had taken weeks of prep work.

He had rerouted the lines underneath the fountain at the center of the eastern Market Plaza, where the high-end clothing stores and women's handbags and leathercrafts were. What a weird look for that fountain. Two big stone hands rising from a little pool, from which water normally jetted thirty feet into the sky.

He got those bitches today! Oh yeah!

With a kick at the valve, he'd set it off from under the street and oh yes, how sweet were those cries and screams. It would have been smarter to retreat through the sewers, but he had just totally needed to go up and see for himself. It was a physical need, and the rush as he burst up from the grate to the sight of dozens of prissy chicks with their kids and hubbies running like crazy as piss and semi-liquid crap rained on them from the fountain...

And of course, then there was the chase, oh yes. And every time he'd let those lesser, slower ninja goons get close, he'd casually kick at a pipeline or valve he had preset that they'd just happen to pass by at that very moment... and kablooey! They too were sprayed with horrific amounts of piss and shit!

He had kept up the chase for an hour so far, and he still had dozens of trapped areas set up ready to go!

The screams already carried for miles! And the smell!

He only felt alive during times like this.

What sucked was that sooner or later, the perfect moment always ended.

"YEEEEAAAAGH..."

Holy shit! His neck was killing him! He was stopped so suddenly his head whipped forward and then back and oh... crap...

"What do you want!"

That smarmy face looked like it was in much too good a mood. He wanted to smack it. He hated that blond hair. Who was that teacher fooling, trying to be cool with bleached hair? How the hell did he catch him anyways? Naruto knew that only mediocre ninja taught at the Academy, and this guy had caught him like he was standing still.

He flailed his arms and legs a bit. Crap. The guy wasn't just fast, he was strong - usually, when he whipped his limbs in sync like that while he twisted his hips and shoulders, the momentum would rip him free of a one-handed grip, possibly at the cost of a torn jacket, but it was almost always enough to get loose. The day before, he'd really felt too guilty about picking on those Saru-whatsits kids to try hard at getting away, but today, he was in super-escape mode. This guy didn't look like he even noticed the attempt.

"Okay, that was pretty awesome. In fact, it was so awesome, and today, you were so good, you actually got some jounin with this stunt. The Hokage himself sent me to get you. So that nobody else would get you first and kill you."

Naruto put on his best cheeky grin.

"Nobody can prove it was me," he said with absolute confidence. "All that stuff was chance, you know? Hey, you know what - you guys should really sue the contractor who did the sewage system. That's what I think."

The big jerk smiled.

"You are absolutely right, orange-boy. They'd never be able to punish you in court. Thing is though - you're a Ninja Academy student now. A cadet-soldier. And ranking ninja can do nearly whatever they want to punish their subordinates, without needing to prove it first, so long as they can justify it to their own superiors."

Oh shit. He had always been able to plead his way out of those civilian juvenile courts before. Was that true? Shit. The last time he'd pulled a major work of amazing-ness was just before he'd started ninja school.

"You're not my teacher yet though!" Naruto exclaimed. "So, uh. I'm not your subordinate?"

"...Hmm. Don't think it's ever come up before during the summer, in between terms. Usually, the ninja's parent decides when it's out of school - but you don't have parents, do you, orange-boy? Well. You should be glad I found you and not any of the others..."

"Iruka! You have that monster! Let me kill him!"

...Oh man. Another one. A chick. A chick he had covered in a spray of raw sewage.

"Um. Please stop laughing mister... You're... making her madder."

"Kurenai-chan! I can't believe he caught you with that! Bwahahaha!"

"I'll forgive you for being a shit, Iruka. I'll forgive that asshole brother/father/whatever of yours for dating my Mom, I'll even forgive that one time I saw you and Eikichi at the night club drooling over Mom and stuffing bills in her g-string... if you let me have five minutes with this... thing."

"Hmm, very tempting."

Naruto was shivering now. What the hell! The chick was almost glowing! Oh crap! His heart seemed to want to explode out of his chest. He could barely breathe.

"But nah, Kurenai-chan. I got the mission to get this guy straight from the Old Man. He decides, and you being such a stickler for the rules and all - well, you'll abide, won't you? Which means, you drop your genjutsu before the kid coughs up blood and such."

"One of these days you little twerp... I'm going to get you."

She disappeared in a whirl of leaves. And sewage.

"Waaagh!"

The spatters caught Naruto, who glared at the laughing creep. The ass had whirled him about in the air in front of himself like a shield.

"You are really something else, orange-boy. We'd better go before anyone else finds you and the killing starts to happen."


	22. Great Punishment

"Oh, Naruto... What am I going to do with you?"

The Hokage felt the weight of remorse. In his clothes. In the stupid hat on his head. In his heart. It was his mistake, informing the Council of the truth about the Kyuubi. It should have stayed his secret with the poor, dead Yondaime.

The boy looked totally gleeful. Unrepentant. But underneath the mask, he could feel the kid's fear and anxiety. The boy was wondering, was this finally when he had gone too far? And then under that. The desparate loneliness of a child that never got to be a child.

"Millions in property damage. That's what happened today, kid. It's not just a prank to the people whose merchandise got wrecked. Or for the ones who got hurt slipping, stepped on by the crowds."

The Hokage shook his head wearily.

If he had just kept his damned mouth shut, he could have had Naruto placed with a real family, surrounded him with people who could love him and show him he didn't have to play the bad guy just to get attention, just to get people to see him. But of course it couldn't be that simple. Because the elder Onizuka had bought Yondaime more time to work on the seals, now, this lonely little boy was the ultimate powerhouse, much too dangerous for any civilian to raise.

The Kyuubi was dead. It's soul was ripped apart from its body of energy, long gone and taken by Death... and then all that power was merged into a very unlucky baby, who had grown up with more energy than he knew what to do with, a confusing bundle of animal instincts, a heart full of rage, and the fear of those around him.

"What am I to do? The businessmen on the council are calling for some drastic punishment for you. I've done my best to keep them from harming you before... maybe I shouldn't have."

The boy was sweating, and rubbing his hands on his pants. His face was brave but he wasn't good enough yet to control the subtle cues given off by his body.

"Onizuka-san. Do you have a suggestion as to what should be done to Naruto?"

Onizuka Iruka. Now this young man... he was an enigma, the student of the most feared man in the Village.

The Hokage knew quite a bit about the history of Onizuka Eikichi, and he had known about the Hokuto Shinken long before Eikichi had demonstrated its devastating power even against demons. It was a debt that Konoha had never officially acknowledged to the 'mere civilian martial artist.'

By stopping the Kyuubi in its tracks single-handedly, Eikichi had spared the lives of the dozens upon dozens of jounin and chuunin that would have been slaughtered by the demon. He had gone in alone, ahead of the ninja, and with inhuman speed and a truly god-like demonstration of sheer power, held off the demon by himself for endless, exhausting hours as Yondaime finished preparing his ultimate Sealing Technique.

How different Konoha would have been without Onizuka! They would have probably lost half or more of their active ninja to the Kyuubi. Rather than just rebuilding the parts of the village that had been damaged by the shaking earth from the approach of the strongest of demons, with only about a hundred casualties, it might have reached the village itself and slain thousands... Outlying farms would have been destroyed, tons of crops lost... Fire Country itself would have gone into recession. And worst of all, Yondaime would have needed to use his imperfect version of the seal, which would have placed the complete living entity of the Kyuubi, its whole consciousness, inside a helpless baby. How long would that prototype seal have held? How much more afraid would everyone be of the boy?

"Let's get it over with then!" Naruto yelled. "If you're gonna punish me, do it! Everyone knows it's me anyway! Quit day-dreaming old man! I'm getting bored here! Anyway, they deserved it! Those rich snobs looking at me like I'm trash... Well, they got their trash today, didn't they?"

The Hokage's gaze drifted between the boy and the teacher.

That bravado. They were so alike. Actually... He recalled young Iruka before the Onizuka had gotten his hands on him. Not at first. So quiet and polite and humble and understated before.

The Hokage had thought it was foolish for young Iruka to want to be a ninja. He did not have the background. And he started so old. Once again, Onizuka had proved him wrong.

He wished, now, that he could go back and have a do-over. Shut up about the demon being sealed in Naruto. Have him adopted by that crazy martial artist too.

It was amazing what Onizuka had done with Iruka. If only that blasted stubborn man could be convinced to train ninja for real...

"You want to speak, Onizuka-san? You have a solution to my problem?"

"I have a proposal."

Hrrmm. So serious. He could tell this would be quite a whopper.

The Hokage braced himself and said, "Speak."

"We pay Naruto the equivalent for an A-rank mission."

Oh yeah. That craziness was contagious. Maybe it's just as well that Eikichi did not adopt Naruto.

The Hokage closed his eyes. It was taking a lot of effort not to laugh. He could sort of see the reasoning behind that action though. It was just the sort of thing that would drive the council crazy. But then... he was the absolute head of the ninja of Konoha. If he acted in that capacity...

"Naruto just did us a great service, pointing out a major weakness in our security. Next time, it might not be vandalism and a prank. Next time it might be ninja of Iwa tunneling into our sewer system, bringing our homes down over our heads. Or it might be poison spewing out of them instead of shit."

Hmm. Now that was a good idea. The council did so hate the Iwa. The Hokage tried to weigh their hate of their old war-time enemy over their fear of what was in Naruto. That fear would have been so much worse if Eikichi had not been there.

"I'm glad to see, Onizuka-san, that you still try to see all your students for who they really are. Rather than for what everyone takes them to be."

"So, I know you can't just give him the salary. That would never happen. Buuut, if you treated this whole thing as though he was just... overzealous in his desire to test our security, well, you know? You pay Naruto for an A mission. And deduct the damages from the payment. It balances out, see? And we could have a suitably public punishment as a reprimand, an example for other ninja and those who would be ninja."

Yes. That could work. The Hokage cleared his throat.

"You know that they'll want him to be caned, publicly. It's the minimum, but just showy enough."

It would leave the boy battered and bloody. But he could still be a ninja afterwards. Still... The Hokage wondered if it would only make the hate in the boy grow. Would Naruto be able to understand that it could be so much worse than a caning? He saw the fear grow in the boy's eyes. He was already thinking of just running away.

Iruka spoke again, loudly.

"Of course. But since I'm one of his teachers, and it is his teachers' failings that made him choose such... methods... Then I should be punished with him. And I'm bigger. Give two-thirds of the lashes to me. In fact. I am a fully-trained ninja, and you know I'm one of your best," at that, Iruka could not help himself grinning, "so maybe you should give me all the lashes."

And then, Sarutobi wanted to smile. Naruto was looking aghast and awed at Iruka. He knew what the other was offering. Maybe some good could come of this.

"H-hey... I don't want to owe nobody nothing..." Naruto objected half-heartedly.

The Hokage pretended he did not hear it.

"Onizuka Iruka, for the inadequacy of Naruto's instruction that lead to his carrying out an off-the-books mission in such an excessive manner, the full payment equivalent to an S-rank mission of infiltrating the sewers of Konoha will be withheld to pay for the damages. For your negligent instruction, you are hereby sentenced:

"Twenty-seven lashes with a cane, delivered by Gai, for you, Onizuka-san. And three for the boy. He has to know what it feels like, or this will mean nothing for him."

The Hokage had once harbored such hopes for that young boy. For years, he could do nothing but watch as the indifference and the subtle erosion caused by scorn and loneliness wore away at him, and the hope had faded. Once again, an Onizuka lit his hope aflame.

The Hokage put a few pinches of fine tobacco into his pipe and lit it, and puffed, slowly, looking without looking at the way Naruto's head drooped, at the way the boy shook, confused about the why.

"Your sentence is to be carried out immediately, in the main square for the citizens to see. Gai, Kakashi. See to it."

They appeared at the sides of the chuunin and the boy who wasn't even really his student yet.

"I'll keep the boy from running," Iruka said quietly. "You don't have to cuff him."

The two jounin nodded. Kakashi appeared as though his mind was far, far away, remembering other faces, and others' sacrifices. And Gai looked like he wanted to weep for Iruka's youthfulness. But he restrained himself, and both of them escorted the two out of the Hokage's office, with all the necessary appearance of decorum and discipline that was demanded. The eyes of the council were everywhere, and already, runners were proceeding to report back to those irksome pricks.


	23. Beating

It took so little preparation. A couple of water techniques from Kakashi gave the plaza with the fountain a cursory cleaning, not thorough, but sufficient enough that when his kage bunshin gathered up the spectators, representatives from around the village, the crowd was not wading through shit.

For the heir of Hokuto Shinken, the lashes could have been nothing.

There were any number of techniques Iruka could have used. He could have channeled Touki into his skin, rendering it harder than the cane itself. He could have pushed his own tsubo to remove all sensation as the blows landed. He could have used the Dragon's Breath and healed his torn flesh even as the wounds were made.

Naruto could do none of these things, and so Iruka did not either, just gritting his teeth as Gai put all his considerable muscle (at least without the boost of chakra) into delivering the force of justice into the caning.

Holy shit, the guy didn't have to be so fucking enthusiastic about everything. Maybe he was into S&M - it would explain his attitude about training.

Even as his body shook, Iruka kept the pain from his eyes, and he kept his gaze steady on Naruto's as they looked at each other while they knelt in position, side by side before the fountain.

Iruka just knelt in place, and did not need to brace himself with his hands to keep still while the lashes ripped his flesh.

Naruto held on to the wooden rail surrounding the fountain in front of him tightly as the three much lighter blows from Kakashi landed on him in quick succession. He gasped, probably more from surprise than pain - it was done so quickly.

But Iruka saw the pain come in the kid's face, twisting as the body signaled the mind with the sting that grew to a fire on the back, even as the boy had to stay there and watch as blow after blow landed on Iruka's flesh, continuing seemingly forever. With each swing of the cane, blood sprayed into the air off of the chuunin's flesh. He saw orange boy grip onto the rail harder and harder, his knuckles turning pale. It just kept coming, between pauses that were so long the kid could not flinch long enough during the wait in between each strike. And there was that sound. It was the sound of meat getting tenderized. It was a sound Iruka bet that the boy only heard when he stole things from the butcher's shop.

Orange boy was starting to look a bit light-headed.

When it was over, Iruka just casually stood, slung his shirt and undershirt over his arm, and pulled Naruto to his feet. Blood streamed down from the ragged wounds on his back, staining his white pants. He brushed at the dust, the pebbles and muck on his knees.

"Show's over."

Gai and Kakashi cleared out the faceless watchers. Well, not so faceless when Iruka looked out at them. The kids in the crowd looked disturbed, the adults just nodded to themselves and murmured about the Hokage's fairness.

"Come on you dumb brat. Let's pick up some groceries. I'll fix you some ramen at your apartment. Onizuka deluxe ramen from Hell! Guaranteed to tempt saints into sin. You'll like it."

"I... Why did you... You're just a moron."

"Bwahaha! You idiot. Don't look at your feet. Look up. What do you see?"

Iruka looked into Naruto's eyes coming up from focusing at the ground. Right over Iruka's shoulder, the boy would first see one of the clothing stores, the glass display case in front covered with a thin layer of piss and shit. Above the building, the boy would see the distant monument, the wise faces of Konoha's Kage looking down at them. Standing in the middle of one of the many plazas in the village, while blood slid down their backs, little red rivulets for Naruto, pouring volcanoes for Iruka, even now, he felt the kind, yet stern faces watching. At least Iruka hoped he did.

And then, the boy looked further up at the sky. It was a beautiful summer day. Just like when the Kyuubi had come, and Iruka's parents never woke up from their sleep, crushed by a beam that feel in their bedroom.

There was a trick of perspective employed in the carving of the faces on the mountain. They were not proportional. They were distorted, so that from many different angles, the wise, serene faces of the Kage seemed to lay their benevolent expression on everyone who looked at them. They were visible from nearly every area in the inner city, which regulated the heights and angles of buildings and roads to maximize the view.

"They're watching, huh?"

"There's always someone watching you, kid. You don't have to do things to get people to see you."

Speaking of which. Ah, hell. Sakaki-chan had pushed through the departing crowd and was suddenly there.

Iruka had not wanted any of his students to see this, which was why he was glad the Hokage sentenced them so quickly. Of course it would be Sakaki-chan who saw them. He wondered if she would still want to be a ninja after this.

"Sensei... I'll... I'll go with you. Fix you guys up. Okay?"

She looked very pale.

"Okay, Sakaki-chan. You hear that you little brat? Manly men who face the consequences always get attention from cute girls."


	24. Great Remorse

Sakaki dabbed at the cuts on his back. They were raw. Gashes. Bruises.

He didn't flinch, he didn't wince. He just kept those wild, not-quite-there eyes on her image in the mirror.

"Iruka-sensei can be really rough. And a boor. And an idiot," she said softly as she debrided and cleaned the torn skin. "But he always cares."

Then she started stitching up the wounds. Behind what she hoped was a soothing smile and warm eyes, Sakaki was boiling mad. Such wounds. A cane wielded by a strong man was much worse than a whip. At least there were no broken bones. She tried to keep soothing, anesthetizing healing energy emanating from her fingers, as she pushed the needle and thread through his skin and worked it back and forth, closing up the long, uneven gashes.

"You don't haveta," he said.

It startled her that his voice was quite a bit quieter than she had expected.

"I mean, if you don't want to fix me up. Nobody does. I won't tell," he added.

Oh that just made her furious!

"Nobody's making me do this. If I left it to Sensei, he'd just say you can tough it out if you want. But... what are you? Ten? That's not right. Somebody should do it."

"Nobody ever does."

That drained the anger out of her. Of course not. Not from all the things the rumors said about him.

"I promise," Sakaki said, "that I'll always do this for you, any time you need me."

In her thoughts, she kept hearing Iruka-sensei's voice.

He had told her mere weeks before: "Sakaki-chan... You have all the tools it takes to become a great ninja. You have great bone structure and from how quickly you picked up Raging Demon style, you also have good innate muscle memory, better than Lee's even. You're smart, you have fantastic chakra control for someone with so much stamina, and you're a creative tactician. But you should quit. You're not meant for this life."

That had made her cry, just a bit, just quietly while the tears rolled down and they stood together alone in the classroom when summer had just started. This was her favorite teacher, the one who always seemed willing to accept the best out of what was possible from everybody.

"Sakaki-chan. The problem is, your heart is too big for this job. I'll help you to be a ninja if you gotta. But nobody should try to turn themselves into the kind of person they were never meant to be. And that means, your big heart is always going to get you hurt trying to fit into a ninja's role. So you gotta ask yourself, kid, can you take it?"

Really, part of her agreed. But she'd said, simply, "My heart gets hurt everyday anyway. Might as well be while doing something worthwhile."

But she had been scared when his eyes just looked so sure and so sad for her.

Oh, that man. He was right. What business did she have promising that to this lonely boy? It was always like this when she'd see those stray cats and want to do something for them and next thing she knew she was disinfecting cuts all over her hands and face.

This boy was a wild thing, it was written all over him. Under that idiot mask he wore most of the time, he was consumed with animal hurt.

"There. It's done."

The boy was going to stand and she shook her head.

"Wait... let me... let me do your hands too."

He had hurt them, digging his fingers into the railing to keep himself still while the blows landed on him.

As she eased his hands into the warm water and started to tease the splinters out from under his nails, his fingers twitched and closed convulsively around her hands and she just closed her eyes and stayed still.

She felt that burning, furious energy a moment before she noticed the claws piercing her. Like curved knives. They went all the way through, claws piercing through the flesh between the bones of her hands. One claw scraped along the bone. It really hurt. She closed her eyes just as his had flashed red. Yeah, what was it with her and wild things?

Sakaki revised her estimate of him upward. Much more dangerous than a mountain wildcat.

"Don't promise if you don't mean it!" he yelled. "I hate all of you pretenders! Just like the ones the old man used to send! I don't need any of you!"

Sakaki just leaned close and pressed her lips to his forehead.

Naruto let her go and scrambled back, scooting on his butt until his shoulders hit the grimy tiled wall of his badly kept bathroom.

"Wh... why'd you do that?"

He went very still, and his eyes weren't glowing anymore, and his fingers stopped being claws.

And he was crying.

Sakaki stayed on her knees and half-crawled next to him. She ignored the bloody smears her hands left on the tiles. Was he really only a few years younger? He seemed so small.

She put her arms around him and just started humming. It was something her mother used to sing before she died, but Sakaki couldn't remember the words, just the melody, and the feeling of being small and warm and perfectly protected with someone's arms around her. He trembled and twitched and once or twice she felt that violent red light flaring up around him.

But soon, all that menacing, heavy presence faded away, and he sort of half-heartedly shoved her back.

"Why'd you do that?" he mumbled, clearing his throat, looking everywhere but at her.

"Can't help myself I guess. Come on. Let's finish cleaning you up and eat okay? Sensei's a decent cook, but. Well... he hasn't seen to his own wounds yet. He pretends to be so macho, but I betcha when he gets home he's going to be all whiny and girly while... while Eikichi-sensei cleans him up."

"I'm... I'm sorry. It doesn't... doesn't usually get out anymore... Oh man... you're bleeding really bad... I... I'm always hurting people. I'm... a lousy jerk... I guess."

Sakaki shook her head.

"It's okay. Happens to me a lot."

She was always letting wild things claw and bite at her.


	25. Changing Feelings

Naruto knew the story.

Everybody did.

Coinciding with his birth, a great demon appeared close to Konoha, and was rapidly approaching. In some versions of the story, this demon was powerful enough to shake the earth with its presence, cause storms in its passage, destruction in its footsteps. In some versions, mostly the ones heard from people who did not quite believe that anything that strong couldn't be stopped by only two people, it wasn't quite that bad.

But you could tell which of the citizens were actually around back then. Those were the ones that saw him and flinched, or cringed, or tried to pretend that he wasn't there. No, Konoha hadn't suffered much, because of the intervention of the Oni-Baku and the sacrifice of Yondaime, but even its approach had caused earthquakes. And even if only mere dozens died rather than thousands, they all remembered the fear, the oppressive weight of just the creature's presence.

Walking along, he caught his image in the display of an electronics store full of video cameras and TVs.

He was changing again. When he wasn't paying attention, his whole body glowed red.

Before, it used to take extremes of emotion to make Its power escape. Now it seemed to flow out of him for the smallest thing.

If he was even a little nervous, maybe his eyes might turn red.

He did not have to be all that angry anymore for the red light to thrust out of his fingers in scythe-claws coming out the tips.

He wasn't even upset or anything at the moment and even then his pale blond hair was all shades of red and orange, standing on end, bristling, looking eerily like fire.

Naruto put his hands over his belly, grimaced, and squeezed, trying to imagine his chakra coils tightening up, restricting the thundering currents of energy through his flesh.

He just wanted to freaking walk to school.

"Naruto? Are you alright?"

Just like that, the flames were snuffed out. Or rather, the power ebbed back, calming.

"Um, hi, Cat-girl."

Today, Sakaki wore beat-up sneakers, baggy jeans ripped open at the knees, a man's shirt that was so big it billowed around her when she moved. He could still see the pale scars on her hands against her tanned skin, and felt again that conflicted anger at himself.

She was smiling at him, and he shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.

"Come on. With Iruka-sensei, you don't want to be late the first day."

"Okay."

Naruto glanced sidelong at her as he walked at her side, practically covered by her shadow. He had not seen her since that day the month before, and hadn't realized at the time how crazy tall she was.

Then he noticed that, if anything, the nasty looks got worse. He knew the reason people were nervous around him, but what was their problem with her?

She was the top student in the Academy these days, smart and tough and really pretty - the students from younger classes knew about her even before that exhibition fight. Haruno and Yamanaka and their bunch spent half their time talking about how awesome she was, and the other half wondering if they could be like that too, sometimes looking down at their slender bodies and sighing. When their class had watched her beat the so-called Hyuuga prodigy, and even that normally indifferent prick Uchiha had watched her closely... Most of the boys stared shamelessly when she'd done that crazy power-up thing.

As for himself, Naruto had once thought she was probably just like those too-cool-for-everybody-else types just like Sasuke. She didn't seem to talk much, she was aloof and cool and superior. She was the number one of her year - didn't that mean she was probably just like the prissy jerk?

The first time they'd spoken was after his stupid stunt with the sewage, and then. Then he didn't know what to think anymore. He couldn't figure it out, the feeling of her touch easing his hurts and the quiet acceptance in her eyes when Its blades came out of his fingers and pierced through her hands.

Watching her as they maneuvered through the early morning crowds of civilian students going to the various technical schools and private institutions and businessmen and laborers getting ready to do their thing as captains of industry and such and housewives on their way to the markets looking to get the first pick of fresh fish and vegetables, Naruto found himself absorbed in her face, the almost-smile she had for everybody, even when there were only frowns or open disdain or the snobbish tilt and turn of a head away in return.

It made him kind of mad, it brought out the splinters in his head that made him want to do more than just prank those people, to hurt them, to watch them bleed. But she just seemed so... okay with it all.

Naruto blinked when they were only a couple blocks away from the Academy, and only then noticed that she had taken hold of his hand to keep them together through the masses of people on the way.

They walked through the gate when it hit him and he turned a little pink, snatched his hand away. Most of his classmates were already at their assigned training area, but he didn't want anyone seeing him like this.

Not that it meant anything anyway.

She was already looking up at the windows of the main school building, from which a tiny girl with pigtails was waving at her.

Then Sakaki turned her smile on him, and it softened, was less open, but still more alive. It drove him a little crazy - he could feel the desire to rip her up with Its claws, but it also reminded him of her embrace, and how nobody'd ever held him like that before.

"I'd introduce you to my friends," Sakaki said, "but we're both about to be late. Good luck this year Naruto. I've got Mizuki-sensei again this morning, and then Iruka-sensei after lunch. Which means you probably have Iruka in the morning. Try to give him a chance, okay?"

The smile for him faded back to that passive not-a-real-smile, and he just did not understand how he felt at seeing it.

"Umm. Thanks... I guess. Good luck too."

She tilted her head, not quite a bow, but close. She leaped about thirty feet straight up onto the side of the building, and lazily walked the rest of the way up the wall to and through the window. She didn't even leave footprints on the light beige paint job.

Naruto hazily made his way through the west entrance through the long hallway towards room 122, wondering if he'd be able to learn that walking on walls trick too, or if it was another of the many things out of his reach because of Its power filling up his coils.

Stupid Yondaime with his stupid experimental seal. Stupid demon.

But did Naruto really want to be just like everyone else, or was he actually happy to be known for something, to stand out just for being himself?

Maybe though, he was trying not to think about the old man Hokage saying stuff about getting stronger by trying to find something to protect. Wasn't that obvious? He had to get strong to protect himself. Everybody had to.

But he was thinking of how angry Sakaki had looked at seeing his wounds, and how it had taken him so long to figure out that she was angry for him.

Then that crazy blond guy who took his lumps on Naruto's behalf... what insane shit was that anyway?

He went through the doorway and was numb and ignored the usual snide remarks from the snide-talking group that only wished they could be as cool as the quietly indifferent cool bunch of lone wolves that were surrounded by bubbles of space, radiating that aura of not needing anyone else.

Sasuke and Shino acknowledged him with their typical lack of response and he stuck his tongue out at them.

Already feeling bored, even just walking in between the desks and the chairs, he felt like being a heel and as he brushed by the Yamanaka's support group, who were starting to cast appraising glances at the Uchiha, he slipped a cockroach out of one of his pockets and dropped it onto Ino's back.

Naruto sat in a random chair and looked down at his hands and flexed his fingers, watching the red blades materialize and fade. Found himself still confused about why the hell that guy had done that for someone he didn't give a shit about anyway.

He did laugh at the howls of that silly blond girl when she finally noticed it crawling onto her hair, but it wasn't quite as much fun as he'd thought it would be. What had happened to today's resolution anyway? He was supposed to have done that to the first Academy chick he saw that morning. Why hadn't he done it to that too-tall, too-busty girl?

Naruto's laughter at Ino shrieking as she crushed the bug under her heel and frantically brushed at her hair became a soft chuckle, became indifference again, became a bored frown.

He could deny it to himself and say that he didn't owe her anything, but the thought of trying any kind of prank, even a little one, on the Cat-girl, made him remember the fathomless shadows in her eyes as she'd held him, made him remember Its blades hurting her and making him feel like a real shit.

He hated it. He had to do something to even things up between them. Somehow.

And then he winced as a piece of chalk smacked into his forehead, disintegrating into a cloud of dust from the impact.

"Hey, orange boy! I said get up and say something about yourself."

...Naruto had a feeling this was going to be a long year.


	26. Demon

"Maybe we should follow her."

"Wh-what? That would be totally creepy." A gentleman doesn't follow around a blossoming beauty like a bandit or a rapist or something!

But he was worried too. For three Mondays in a row now, Sakaki came to school covered in bandages and scabbed-over cuts. She sometimes had little adhesive-strip bandages on her cheeks, across her nose, and bigger ones winding around her arms, and one day when she wore shorts, they could see she had them on her legs too.

Chiyo-chan said, "Well, we could just ask her."

"Nooo!" Osaka exclaimed. "What if she's being blackmailed by gangsters or something? Or maybe she's dating some bad boy who abuses her in all sorts of ways! If she tells, maybe he'll whip her!"

Now that was too much! Lee exploded to his feet, "Nooo! Nobody can whip Sakaki-san!" He could just imagine some huge beast of a man restraining her, tearing at her clothes and doing... Then he was crying, "Poor, poor Sakaki-san! We should definitely follow her one weekend, it's our duty as friends!"

Then he paused, suddenly having this weird feeling. He looked over his shoulder and there was just a lamp post there.

"N-no, Osaka-chan, Lee-kun... I'm sure she's just fine. She wouldn't let some boy hurt her!"

Osaka murmured, "But what if it's a cute dominatrix girl with cat eyes and furry cat ears?"

They all paused at that thought, imagining some neko-girl in black leather clawing and whipping at a blushing, gasping Sakaki.

"Nooooooo!" Lee and Chiyo-chan wailed together.

They kept walking. The argument was mostly winding down at this point. Even though Chiyo-chan was sure that there was no way Sakaki was in some kind of abusive relationship with a secret bad-boy goon or evil S and M cat-girl, well. Better to be sure. Sakaki was just the sort who might let the right (wrong) sort of person take advantage of her.

"Okay, let's go to her place early on Sunday."

Anyway, it had been quite a while since they'd all done something together on the weekend.

Lee whipped his head around again. It was just the old man selling tofu in sweet molasses at the corner, like usual.

"What are you looking at, Lee-kun?"

"I just had this feeling."

And then he dropped a weighted chain from his sleeve into his palm and flung his arm back as he turned, a blurry black line of steel.

"Got you!"

The tall figure sighed, started unwrapping Lee's chain from his wrist.

"I'm getting careless if you can sense me, Lee."

"Ah!" Chiyo-chan chirped, "Neji-kun! If you were worried about Sakaki too, you could have just said so."

"I'm not worried. She's too strong for any situation remotely similar to what your over-active imaginations are coming up with."

Lee accepted the other end of his combat chain from Neji and pocketed it again. Then he tilted his head and peered suspiciously at Neji.

"Did you just have a nose-bleed?"

"O-of course not!"

Osaka smacked her fist into her palm. "I see! The thought of a busty girl getting the clothes torn off her can make boys act weird!"

"No way," Lee said. "I'm not that kind of guy!"

Neji, wiping self-consciously at his nose with a black scarf he'd pulled from his coat pocket, muttered, "Your nose is red too, idiot."

Somehow, through the storm of teasing that happened, during which even Chiyo-chan was reduced to blushing by Osaka's casual remarks, they made the resolution to meet at dawn on Sunday. Neji too.

For some reason, Lee didn't mind so much, knowing that Neji was also an admirer of Sakaki-san at this point. It was a kind of kinship, wasn't it? It made him feel better that he wasn't the only boy who felt that Sakaki was somehow beyond their reach. It wasn't just her age, and it wasn't her looks. There was a part of her that always seemed guarded, even from Chiyo-chan and Osaka.

Before he knew it, it was already the dawn of their appointed meeting. He wanted to wear something nice since it was sort of an outing with friends, but then, what if they had to beat up some person taking advantage of Sakaki? Heck, either the person was very strong and could force himself or herself onto the strongest student in the Academy, or the person was gut-wrenchingly cute and manipulated Sakaki that way. In either case... He vowed he would not be helpless!

But he was. They all were. Even though they showed up fairly bristling with weapons and knives, and Neji wore the white Hyuuga combat robes that he'd stopped wearing everyday since his defeat at Sakaki's hands.

They used Neji's vision to follow her from distances and angles where there was always something between them and her.

Maybe it was because he was straining himself to stay focused on her despite the distance and the obstacles like lamp posts and newsstands and people walking their dogs or biking or jogging, but when they did finally, cautiously approach the training ground she used, outside the outer wall of the city and a mile into the forest, Neji was surprised too.

They cowered there, at the edge of the clearing, hiding behind bushes and trees, on their knees, glimpsing the battle that had already begun through the twigs and branches and leaves, and the clouds of dust and steam in the distance.

There were old craters scattered around the ten thousand square foot field. Tree-stumps dotted the uneven surface, charred pieces of wood, shattered boulders.

And on that field of combat, Sakaki was magnificent. She wore her battle gloves and snug, faded, cut-off jeans and her beat-up sneakers and the leather vest Lee had given her and a sports bra beneath that. She was surrounded with the gold-white radiance of her maximized Tenryu Kokyu Ho, her dark eyes sparkling with power, the muscles of her long arms and legs and on her exposed belly and shoulders rippling, taut.

She moved like the wind.

And a Red Beast was ripping through everything in between them. Boulders exploded into clouds of fragments with Its passage. When it roared, it was thunder. The light coming from its dark heart was baleful, oppressive - just seeing it made Lee tremble in place.

Over the sound of the explosive impacts of Sakaki's feet against the ground, and the snarling crash of the beast, they could hear her voice.

"You're moving like how you think It would have moved!" she said loudly, over the howling, dust-whipping winds churned up around them. "You're not moving the way you could move! Use your tails - they're not just for show, and they're not just for balance! You can push off of the ground with them to jump faster and higher, you can use them to cushion your landings, you can extend them around trees as you move to make impossible turns!"

The beast screamed louder, but apparently did as she said, and its blurring speed increased. The tails of light could move faster than its own limbs, and became sets of additional legs, propelling it towards her, no longer an over-sized fox but a burning red, multi-armed comet that cut a violent wake along the ground, kicking up gravel and bits of grass behind it.

"Wh-what's going on?" Chiyo-chan whispered, shaking as she held tightly onto Osaka, who was hunched over, eyes closed, fists pressed against her temples, rocking back and forth.

Neji whispered, "The demon boy... Sakaki-san is teaching him."

A flicker, a beam of searing red stretched out and opened a shallow cut that stretched all the way across Sakaki's tanned belly.

"That's it! You can change the shape of the light! You don't have to have claws and tails, or you can have more of them than the real Kyuubi ever had! It's all in your head!" she was calling out, dancing back and forth, avoiding the explosions of dust and rock from the beast's missed attacks smashing into their surroundings. "The light doesn't belong to It anymore, the light is yours! It's up to you how you shape it!"

There was a gasp then. Lee wasn't sure if he was the one that let it out. Maybe it was Neji.

As Sakaki skidded around in a spin that whirled her between a pair of massive granite boulders, she kicked out against one and then the other, reversing her motion, flipping towards the beast. Tendrils of razor light sliced the air, and she twisted through them, leg stretched out in a kick.

When her foot made contact, the gold and the red mingled, exploded.

The sound: a deafening thunderbolt. The earth shifted under the feet of the watching friends, and blistering hot waves of air pressure pushed back at the them, set the trees around them swaying, shriveled up the leaves on the ground.

Lee's eyes watered. Neji was writhing on the ground, clutching at his face. It was surely far worse for him, since he had been watching with his doujutsu activated.

The impact flung the creature a hundred feet back to the other end of the clearing, its tails and claws and arms hooking, cutting deep grooves in the dark earth. Even that soil, wet from last night's rain, was steaming, lines of vapor climbing around it.

The earth was too soft to form a crater, so at the point of impact, the ground rippled outward in concentric waves from the pressure, stretching out in a fifty foot radius. Sakaki was crouched down there, one knee down in the dirt, he hands planted down too, ready to help launch her forward again. Her eyes were alive, so much more alive than when Lee saw her at school or even at the Dojo.

She straightened up, clapped her hands together, and bowed. "That's enough today, Uzumaki-kun. Umm. We have an audience."


	27. Extra Training

It was probably the first time they'd ever been alone together. But she didn't feel nervous. She felt safe with him. Anyway, it was hard to think about stupid stuff when she had to concentrate hard on putting her strength, minus any chakra-cheating, into lifting a steel bar loaded up with iron discs all together weighing as much as she did. Slowly, she pushed it off of her chest and up.

She had to yell to get it the last few inches up and extend her arms straight out.

"Now hold it a second," he said to her. "Three counts to bring it back down and one more."

The sweat poured down her face, streaked along her bare, whipcord arms. She lowered the barbell back to where it just touched her chest, a long, single breath in on the way down. Her trembling arms were very close to giving.

"Last one."

Sakaki's mind emptied itself as she focused all of herself into the lift. She exhaled as she pushed, and then halfway up, she could feel her triceps and shoulders losing it. She was going to drop it.

"S-sensei," she hissed.

Then his hands were next to her hands. But only helping just the slightest amount.

"You can do this. It's easy, come on."

This time, she screamed with everything she had and pushed and her vision blurred and when it cleared, she was holding it up at full extension, without his assistance at all.

He helped her lower it back onto the rack behind the bench.

When she heard it settle with a ring of steel on steel, she let go with her hands and her arms flopped limply down. She gasped, sucking and pushing out lung-churning gulps of air.

"Excellent," he said, smiling at her.

She reached out and he lifted her upright easily. She felt a little dizzy from the heat in the room, the leftover smells of strenuous activity, and found herself distracted by the strength in his huge, hard hands. The aches in her sore body lessened.

He passed her a bottle of water and she tossed her head back to let the cool liquid slide down her throat.

"So, are you regretting your request yet?"

It was so hot in here! Thirst sated, Sakaki lifted the plastic from her lips, splashed some of the water onto her face before putting the cap back on the bottle. Shook her head.

"I have to be stronger."

"Hrrmm, well, you and your friends are alike in that desire, that's for sure."

"Why just me, Sensei?"

"The weights? The others are too young. Their bones can't take it yet. You're actually a bit too young yourself, but your bone structure is amazing."

Sakaki had no doubt this would help her strength, but she frowned as she looked at her arms, at the outline of the muscles of her thighs, visible through her black tights. Sighed. She was already too tall and now she was going to end up too muscular and not at all the slightest bit cute.

"Now now, none of that. I promised you, right? You're not going to look disproportional or manly at all. You'll still be a curvy girl. This routine is designed for muscle recruitment and explosive strength, not bulking up. Also, your height will disguise how much muscle you're putting on."

"I just... I don't want to stand out."

Iruka smiled at her, and shook his head.

"A bit late for that, don't you think? You aren't meant to be a killer in the shadows. Your body is not the body of a ghost hiding in darkness. It's a body that's meant for fast movement, powerful attacks, and the stamina to last through long battles. And you're way too pretty to fade into a crowd."

Blushed, couldn't help it. Yes. She knew that well enough. But sometimes... she still wanted to hide and disappear. Only her friends gave her the strength to maintain the outward mask, a cultivated look of cool indifference.

"Anyway, that's enough weight training for today. Your buddies are still doing chakra control exercises on the roof and the back wall - you go join 'em. But don't stay up there too late."

"Okay. And... thanks, Sensei."

Opening the door out to the hall and the stairs, Sakaki only then heard the shadow of a step, smelled another scent, tasted something electric in the air.

She paused, kept going to the stairwell.

This would be interesting, if she didn't get caught.

She waited a long count to ten. Jumped up to the ceiling, crawled across it back to the door. And listened.

"-everbody else!"

"No, it's not because of that. That's not why I won't accept you at this Dojo."

"But why?"

"I know it's difficult to have patience, Orange-boy. But you have a strength in you that is unlike anything else. You don't need what is taught here to become strong."

"You're full of shit just like everyone else!"

As the kid pounded out the door, Sakaki released her chakra, dropped to her feet in a smooth crouch, absorbing the impact soundlessly. Standing at her full height, she sometimes forgot how short this kid was. Maybe she should check on him sometimes at his place, make sure he ate a decent dinner.

For a moment, she thought he would walk through or over her. But he stopped.

Naruto wouldn't meet her eyes. His fists opened and closed, and when they opened, blades of red light stretched out from his fingertips.

"I wanted... to be strong like you," he said softly. "But I guess... Sensei has a point. I'm already... already hurting people, even when I don't mean to."

That expression of misery and disappointment and self-loathing. She used to see that look all the time. On her friends' faces. And in the mirror.

It hadn't taken long during the previous year for her to realize that, above all, Iruka-sensei was kind. He was a total softie acting all macho to hide it. Except for situations involving death... where he was transformed. If Sensei did not want Naruto to learn Raging Demon, there was probably a good reason. This kid... Sakaki had felt it herself, seen hints of the power inside him.

And then she thought about that day that she remembered in dreams every night, a sequence of moments in perfect clarity. The way that no one could take the Butcher's back. Every time one of the Iwa ninja had thought they had the advantage, they simply died, from a casual touch moments before, one they had not noticed.

There was no way Iruka-sensei had not known she was listening in.

What did he want from her? And then she thought about all the pieces of things he would say in between messing around and cussing at the students and forcing them to learn and punishing those who didn't. She just had to act the way that was true to herself.

"Well? I'm going to go now and... train."

Sakaki's hand was on his shoulder before she had time to think about it. She bent low, whispered into his ear, "If you want it, I'll help you learn just a little on the weekends. Okay?"

Disbelief, wide eyes. It was funny on him, the sudden change. And then the cautious narrowing of eyes, the naked suspicion that she was just messing with him. It was cute. She fought the urge to pat him on the head.

"Won't you get in trouble?"

"I can't teach you fancy techniques that belong to the Dojo. But I can help you with the standard Academy stuff, and show you how to improve yourself with what you already know."

"I... I don't want to owe you anything."

"It'll be training for me too."

"Huh?"

Sakaki took his closed fists, turned them over. Next to his hands, they could both see the parallel scars on her palms.

"Sensei is right in that you are already very strong, Uzumaki-kun. Right now... he doesn't have time to help you refine that strength. He works best with giving the weak something to make them more than what they are. But maybe I can help you out a little bit, okay? And you'll be helping me too."

She pressed into the pressure point in the web between thumb and metacarpals, and he hissed at the pain.

His fingers flexed, the red light shimmered into prominence around him, tails whipping madly behind, the hint of extended points from his ears, blades from his fists. The air was heavier, a hot blanket of dry current around them.

It was like holding on to a storm. Her fingers tingled, she had to physically fight from being pushed away by the red light enveloping him.

There was a sad look in his eyes when she released the pressure points, and the light faded back into his eyes.

She didn't run. She just stayed their, fingers just lightly brushing against the backs of his hands.

"That is an awesome power in you, Uzumaki-kun. You need to learn control. And for me... it will be plenty of training just to survive."

"I don't want to hurt you, Cat-girl. You... you're," his voice got tiny, a breathless whisper, "you're just about the closest thing I have to... to..."

"It's just training, Uzumaki-kun. And I haven't spent all this time working hard for nothing. I've gotten stronger. It's not enough yet for what I need, but maybe it's enough to help someone like you."

He was looking up again. There was hope. But still, the disappointment almost seemed to make the spiky tufts of that red-blond hair droop.

"Why..." Naruto whispered, "why won't he teach me?"

Sakaki found herself answering, again, before she could think about what she was saying.

"Do you know who Iruka-sensei is?"

"He's an idiot. He talks about porn in class. Half the time when he's supposed to be teaching, he has us go out and have a barbecue. And he's also the guy who... took most of my punishment in my place," Naruto said, looking at the sign over the door.

Oni-Baku basic combat style: The Raging Demon - that's what it said. Sakaki could see his lips mouthing the words.

"Iruka-sensei was ANBU. One of the few chuunin that stood at the side of jounin - no, in front of them, fighting, usually alone, because they would catch themselves just watching him."

"So what? What's the big - "

"Most of his missions are sealed. But there's one that all the older students have already heard about. They twist the details, a lot. Most of the rumors are stupid," she said as she took his hand, and started leading him down the hall to the stairs.

She didn't really want Iruka-sensei to hear her spilling one of his secrets. A story she had been told by Chiyo-chan, who overheard him talking to another ninja while she was crouched low, cleaning up behind the counter of the bar she sometimes worked at.

Down the bare concrete steps, Sakaki kept going, telling Naruto the story.

"Our sensei is the heir to the Fist of the North Star. A fighting technique so deadly, every other ninja village would kill to obtain it. So every ninja village sends hunters after him, groups of powerful ninja whose only aim is to capture him, and force the secrets of the Fist from him.

"You'll hear versions of this story where Iruka-sensei killed one hundred jounin all at once. But that's not quite true. He was alone after two of his team-mates died in the fighting. They took out ten. So he had maybe fifty or so to himself. Most of them were genin, sent in to be slaughtered and tire him out. Some of them were chuunin. The precious few jounin who knew they would probably die anyway waited until the last moment before joining in the battle."

She could picture that scene. One man against many. Even with his perfect art, even with Dragon's Breathing to bring out his full potential, how exhausting to fight so many, running, constant motion to keep them off his back, striking while being bombarded with fire, with lightning, with water, with earth, with air, with fists and feet, blunt weapons and bladed, elbows and knees, all wielded with the intent to kill. Creatures summoned from the aether, giant beasts that needed to be slain too. And one after another, each kill steadily tougher, requiring more skill, more stamina, demanding more attention.

And she told him about being a child, being saved by the man whose touch brought death.

"Why are you telling me this?"

Out here, they could see the moon climbing up above. The air was so much cooler than in the overheated confines of the Dojo.

Sakaki leaped up to wall of the Dojo, perched herself horizontally, looking down on him.

"I don't know," she said. "It was just something to talk about."

"The fucking hell," Naruto muttered.

"I'll come by your place after I'm done training here. I'll cook you dinner."

"Hey, who asked you!"

She was already walking around the corner of the building, thinking about the flow of her energies through her. They had to flow energy continuously inside of themselves and outwards - they were not just practicing control by walking up and down the walls, they were expected to clean the surfaces by putting energy right through their feet and sort of blasting energy at the dirty areas around the point of contact, while still sticking, and without getting their shoes dirty. She knew this was high level control beyond Raging Demon, and much more than what genin were expected to handle. These exercises, they were in preparation for something else. Already, she had imagined some ways that this kind of control could be used to further enhance the Dragon's Breathing, using it in concert with the physical amplification allowed by quick flowing chakra.

--

That's when Sakaki's story about the day she'd made her deal with Naruto trailed off, and she blushed, mumbling, "And that's how it was," before digging into the flaky crust of her croissant.

It was pretty easy to remember how it had happened.

She left out the parts with Iruka-sensei though. Those moments... felt like they didn't belong to anyone else.

"You should have told us, Sakaki-chan," Chiyo poked her in the side hard, ignoring the way her friend winced.

And then her four overprotective friends were letting Naruto have it. Un-gentlemanly, Lee was yelling, while Neji was leveling his best you-are-not-worth-it sneer down his nose at Naruto (in between the long seconds that the Hyuuga stopped to press a scarf full of ice chips against his not-quite flash-blinded eyes) and Osaka-chan was reaching for her knives and even Chiyo was glaring menacingly. A menacing little girl with bristling brown pigtails who didn't come up to Sakaki's waist when they were both standing was just too, too cute.

"I, uh. Umm. I'm really sorry. I. I hate it when Cat-girl-sempai gets wounded, but she yells at me if I hold back when we practice. So... please don't make me pay for all this!" Naruto cried out, eyeing each other person's food on the table. Steaming dishes of shrimp dumplings, sandwiches, bowls of thick stew, stacks of hot bread, piles of sliced, salt-fried potatoes, chilled tea, apple slices braised in light syrup. "I'm really broke until next week when the next check comes in!"

He was suddenly cross-eyed as the point of one of Osaka's daggers appeared, glinting, twitching in front of his nose. "It's your responsibility," she said in her sing-song voice.

Sakaki patted Naruto on the head, unable to stop herself at the helpless look on the kid's face. "They're just kidding you, Uzumaki-kun. Lee owns this restaurant. You can help yourself to the food."

She smiled when his head tilted one way and then the other and his cheeks reddened as he wrung his hands. He looked so bewildered as they went from yelling at him to talking about how to help him more with his control and back again so quickly. He was a little cutie. They all were: Osaka and Chiyo-chan fussing over her bandages in between bites of their burgers, and even Lee and Neji, who were having a weirdly flattering argument about who was strong enough between the two of them to help her out with training Naruto in a more direct capacity.

Sakaki closed her eyes and savored the sounds of their discussion, their voices, their beating hearts, the light of the sunset on the stone benches next to the food-stand, and even the aches and pains of her battered body. She was alive, and getting stronger, getting closer to her goal. Today, it did not seem so far away.


	28. New Admirer

He had to test himself and test himself he would.

"You want to what, underclassman?" the thick-browed idiot asked, almost slack-jawed.

"I'm challenging your pretty-haired friend here to a match."

"Err. Hey, bastard," that stupid Naruto interrupted, "who do you mean?"

Why were they wasting his time? Well, it was true. Both the Hyuuga and the giant girl had shiny, smooth, silken hair.

"Naruto, he means me," said the older boy as he brushed his long locks back from his shoulders.

"Man, here we are, having a nice lunch, and this asshole's gotta - ouch, hey, stop it!"

The giant girl gently picked Naruto up by the back of his shirt.

"You really curse too much, Uzumaki-kun," she said. "Hyuuga-san, please don't hurt Naruto's friend too badly."

"Yes, Neji," the boy with... they weren't just thick eyebrows, they were bushy caterpillars... continued, "It's not proper for a sempai to be too rough! Iruka-sensei wouldn't approve."

"He's not my friend, he's a stuck-up jerk-faced - owwww! Hey, Sakaki-chan, not the eeeear! Why always the eeeear!"

Hyuuga Neji shook his head and sighed as he straightened out his coat, flexed his wrists and fingers and stretched his arms up and to the sides. He said, "Don't mind them, Uchiha-san. They can't help it."

Sasuke kept himself from shaking his head in disdain. Naruto looked ridiculous, trying to claw backwards at the giant girl with the monster's blades and failing, because her reach was so much greater. He looked like a toy in her hands.

He also reigned in his mounting irritation and anger. They were all so sure that the older boy would win! Why would they think that? The giant girl had beaten that pretty Hyuuga so easily just months before, without any fancy techniques or anything! Surely Sasuke would give him quite a fight, if not beat the guy outright.

Finally though, they cleared some space, moving their picnic blanket and plates and basket and drinks and food to a shady spot in between a couple of oak trees out of the row lining the sandstone pathway from the western entrance of the school, and Sasuke could feel his heart beat faster. He would have preferred to fight the giant girl, really, but he doubted he was ready for her. She had too much reach, and from what he'd seen of her fighting, for all that her chosen style was crude, it was efficient and practical, and she was fast and very, very strong.

Five feet away, Hyuuga Neji was shaking his head and sighing.

"What is this about anyway, Uchiha-san?"

"I want to see how I measure up against the genius of what has become the strongest clan in Konoha."

The Hyuuga sighed, tugged his dark glasses away from his face, tucked them into the pocket of his suede jacket.

"So that's how I looked."

"What?"

"The way I looked and acted to Sakaki-san and her friends all the time. I finally get to see it from the other side," Neji said, shaking his head. "Come then, Uchiha-san. I don't want to let the lunch that Chiyo-chan and Sakaki-san cooked get cold."

The Hyuuga assumed his stance, knees slightly bent, weight evenly balanced between his off-set feet. His torso was side-on, presenting a reduced profile, with one arm tucked in close, the other extended towards Sasuke, fingers stretched out.

Damn it. He wasn't taking him seriously at all! The Hyuuga did not even activate his doujutsu.

Well. Sasuke was not above taking advantage. He blinked once, twice, and his irises turned red, the black marks spinning about the pupils. He'd show them it was a mistake to hold back! He could not imitate that crazy chakra-amplified muscle performance boost that Sakaki had used to break this guy's face, but she already had this guy beaten without it. Sasuke's feet swept along the ground, gliding, guided by the supernatural ability trained into his body to adapt Sharingan-witnessed taijutsu moves into his family's own specialized style.

Sasuke's eyes took in the set of Neji's shoulders, the slight flicker of the muscles around those pale eyes, the tension in the angles of the feet and the curvature of the spine, and he could foresee the path of those reaching palms, and he darted beyond them, closing past the boundary of Hyuuga taijutsu's optimal minimum range.

Just as Sasuke had witnessed in the exhibition fight, the Hyuuga's knife-hand and palm strikes glanced by him without doing any damage. He flung his arms forward, and in between his short-ranged teai hits that Neji parried, he slid an arm into an underhook on the Hyuuga, and, chakra thundering down his legs, he drove forward hard.

And then Neji smiled, just as Sasuke fired in the first of a series of low-arcing elbows for the Hyuuga's ribs with his free arm.

"Idiot. You think it's so easy to imitate Sakaki-san's moves?"

The Hyuuga chuckled mildly as his own forearm smashed into Sasuke's, robbing the elbow-strikes of any energy at all before they touched his side.

Neji's arms twisted through Sasuke's in a drifting spiral that Sasuke's eyes could see partially, but which his mind could not interpret. Somehow, the Hyuuga triangle-stepped out and through Sasuke's clinch like a ghost.

It couldn't be! How was it possible that he could not understand the Hyuuga's movement?

Sasuke found himself flailing at empty space in front of him, while Neji had his back. He grit his teeth hard as his hands flickered through the seals. He danced in a trajectory trying to circle Neji, pushed his footwork hard to slide him just out of the effective striking space of the Hyuuga. And he frowned. The blasted pretty-boy hadn't even bothered to try to hit him while he had been open.

"Uchiha Sasuke, give up," his pale-eyed foe said, the thin line of his mouth quirking into the slightest smile. The Hyuuga was back in his starting stance, still looked relaxed, at ease.

Shit. Why? He had trained so damned hard!

Sasuke ran forwards at an angle, trying to control the distance between them, and started to go through the familiar sequence as he called up chakra and tinged it with the flame.

Only, the Hyuuga was suddenly once more out of his line of sight. Sasuke bit his lip in frustration as he looked up, then down, then to the right, trying to get the Hyuuga back in view. He was to Sasuke's left. Off to one side again, and far too close. Long black hair flowing back from his face in perfect waves, the Hyuuga slapped at Sasuke's hands, disrupting the sequence, causing the chakra to fizzle inside Sasuke's coils.

"The limitation of my clan's eyes is that we see everything, but we have no enhancement in seeing motion. Your eyes are the opposite. You see motion, chakra in motion too, but only with what is in your field of view, and you don't see static chakra that well, so you cannot see through objects with our facility, and it is also why even the most perfect Sharingan cannot see the opening points," Neji said, not at all pressured by Sasuke's combinations of short knee strikes, shin kicks at the legs, elbows and knife-hands, deflecting them with backhands to the knee, robbing them of power with chops to the thigh or palm thrusts to the bicep or shoulder before his blows could reach full velocity. "For the Hyuuga, extreme close range fighting robs our eyes of utility because the short movements are too fast to track easily. Similarly, your bloodline is also poor at this range - because your field of view is narrowed and your own limbs and body obstruct my movements from your sight. Tunnel vision and blind-spots.

"For this kind of fighting, neither of our bloodlines helps much at all."

Shit, shit, shit. The Hyuuga had breath to spare to lecture him and Sasuke was getting tired. Sasuke was using chakra to push his body's speed to its limit, joints creaking, tendons snapping with each move, each step jolting him up his legs and spine, and he still could not land a solid hit.

It was like trying to strike water.

"What I have though, is the experience of having recently sparred against quite a few people using this approach."

The pretty-boy was right. This close, with their limbs tangled up half the time, Sasuke could not see enough of Neji to predict his motion. And Sasuke could not control the distance and break loose - Neji was at least as fast, and far more accustomed to channeling chakra through his limbs with every movement. The Hyuuga was also not spending any energy to activate his bloodline - he was not tiring at nearly the same rate.

Every time Sasuke thought his eyes caught Neji's motion and could launch a strike that was sure to hit, Neji would juke unpredictably, launching perfect parries from outside of Sasuke's vision or using his body positioning to move the vital targets by bending from the hips or waist without warning.

"It was a mistake to charge in at the very start," Neji said, still infuriatingly calm, even as his agressive, probing, countering, parrying defense wore Sasuke down. "That negated your only advantage. It would have been smarter to stay completely beyond my reach and use your flame techniques or weapon techniques to open with, using the prediction of your eyes to avoid my path. I suppose you can be forgiven for making that mistake though. You have no idea how many other students have challenged me in the past weeks, trying to use the same strategy that Sakaki-san used. Hopefully, after this, they'll take a hint."

Unimportant nobodies were watching and this Hyuuga could spare the attention to notice them!

Again, Sasuke was sure he had the arrogant prick. Perfect position and angle. He threw a simple right hook, with all the power flowing up from his hips, his torso, his shoulder, his arm. He had shattered bricks with this blow.

This time, it did hit.

But Sasuke was the one injured.

The Hyuuga had done one of those confusing movements by pushing off from a foot out of Sasuke's sight. Neji twisted and turned, took the punch straight on the forehead, rather than in the jaw. Neji had flung his head into the blow, head-butting Sasuke's incoming fist before the punch reached full extension, changing the nature of the impact.

In that moment of surprised pain as his hand almost broke, Sasuke flinched, eyes closing for just a moment. In that instant, he felt the wind from his opponent's whole body spinning, and the hard, flat impact of a backfist against the arm he had thrown up in a desparate block. It sent Sasuke tumbling head over heels, sideways.

A hand clamped around one of his feet before he even hit the dirt, and he was gasping, slapping hard at the ground as he felt immense pressure on his ankle as the foot was twisted.

"Not too bad, Uchiha. You may have been more of a challenge to the person I was before I fought Sakaki-san. I owe her a lot. Let's do this again when you too, are more than what you are now. Thank you for the match."

The Hyuuga released him, bowed, was already walking to where his classmates sat before Sasuke could really take in this indignity.

He had lost. Totally. His fists pounded the earth, bloodying his knuckles. He had not even been able to try the new fireball technique he had recently mastered, or the combination wire-work and shuriken tactic that had taken so many endless hours to learn. If the Hyuuga's companions weren't all so close, Sasuke would quite probably have pulled his knives and tried to stab the prick from behind.

A hand in front of his face. A soothing voice.

As Sakura tried to help him up, he snarled at her so fiercely that she fled. They all fled, Ino and those other useless girls too. What did he say anyway? He ought to have paid more attention, if it could get rid of those useless girls so quickly.

Shit. The Hyuuga probably had some bruising on his forehead from the punch, but it was completely concealed by the bandanna he wore. Otherwise, the pleats on his goddamned khakis weren't even crinkled. Meanwhile, Sasuke's limbs were covered in bruises from hard parries and blocks. His shirt and pants were dusty from hitting the ground. Sweat streamed down his face from this exertion. And that vicious ankle lock had gone right to the edge. He could barely walk.

The other Academy students that had gathered to watch were murmuring amongst themselves about the decline of the Uchiha since Itachi had gone nuts, but that didn't matter, those were nobodies anyway. The worst was the look on that idiot Uzumaki's face. Naruto hadn't paid attention to the fight at all. As though he had already known that Sasuke would lose.


	29. Rooftop Blues

Sakura ran up the stairs.

Her feet pounded on the steps, her stomach muscles were clenched tight from breathing so hard. Her face was flushed. Her cheeks felt hot. And her throat was dry.

She could have just run up the side of the building. She had the control. But she would have run out of chakra halfway up. Anyway, there was something therapeutic about running pointlessly up the stairs. It made it easier to empty out her head.

It was lunch. Most of the students were outside goofing off or training or eating in the cafeteria downstairs.

She slammed open the door at the top, gasping for breath, and stumbled out onto the rooftop.

It was windy up there, and as she caught her breath, limping over to the railing, hand pressed to the cramp in her side, she pressed her other hand against her skirt to keep it from flapping up.

She sat down against the rail and looked up at a cloudy sky. She stayed there for hours, just feeling the wind sliding around her. Soon, the color of the sky was changing.

The roof access door opened again. It was their new sensei. She didn't like him.

Her dislike increased when he walked over to a spot beside her, and lit a cigarette.

"Role models aren't supposed to smoke."

"Are you dumb? Ninja are supposed to have all kinds of vices. Therefore, I am fulfilling my duties as a role model."

That nasty smile.

"Sensei, how come you're still here? Don't you have a class or something at your Dojo to teach?"

"Our students have the day off today. Hah, really, I'm still here because I got a message from Bro not to come home today. I guess it's one of those 'getting lucky' nights for him. No way would I be able to sleep from the noise. I'll probably crash at the office - this is why I've got a sleeping-bag in my locker here."

Sakura's jaw dropped, then she blushed.

"Don't you think I'm too young to be hearing about this stuff?"

Iruka took a few puffs, blew smoke rings up into the air to drift along the wind.

"That's true. Well, how's this then. It's after working hours, so right now, I don't necessarily have to be your sensei, and thinking about being professional and such."

Not really, she thought.

"Anyway, apparently you're not too young to have that silly, forlorn, 'woe-is-me,' gut-kicked look. So you shouldn't be too young to hear about more mature relationships."

She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her head against them, hiding her face. Why did he have to come up here anyway?

"Oh, yes, I am. You're a bad man, corrupting the youth."

He burst into laughter, which made her cheeks burn worse. Asshole. He held out the cigarette towards her.

"Want a puff?"

"No!"

"It is a nasty habit, really. Stains the teeth, cuts down breath capacity, etc. etc. and so forth. So I brush my teeth with whitening stuff several times a day, I have to work out that much harder just to compensate for the changes to my heart and lungs, and I just might die of cancer later on. Doesn't seem likely though - how many ninja you've heard about have lived long enough to die from cancer? Someone will kill me before then. Sandaime is really quite a guy to be so strong and to have lasted up to his age."

He tapped the cig against the steel rail, watched the hot ashes float away.

"What are you really doing up here, Sensei?"

"I told you, I'm staying at the school tonight because my foster father and his lady are getting their groove on and there's no way I'd be able to get any rest. And the few friends I've got - they're out on missions. Well, except for this one girl, but she still has a thing for me and I don't have a thing for her, so it wouldn't exactly be fair to go, 'Hey, can I crash at your place tonight?'"

Sakura stood up, red-faced, turned towards the sunset. At her feet, the smooth gray of the concrete surface was pink and gold. If she turned to look in the opposite direction, she would see the faces of the Kage on the monument lit up in those same warm colors. If she turned thirty degrees to the South, she would be able to see, in the distance, in between two competing department stores facing each other, the little apartment she shared with her parents on the outskirts of the Old Districts, close to the edge where the original wall stood.

"Does she know you don't like her?"

"Ah, well," Iruka glanced at the cig, which had burned down almost to the butt. He tossed it up into the air, flashed it into ash with a burst of chakra.

That too was dust in the wind.

"But I do like her, you see. She's just about my best bud. But I'm not in love with her. She knows that, but you know, some girls are content with being cared for, and don't mind so much if they love their partner more than the other way around. I'm not okay with that though."

Sakura took a handkerchief from her pocket, wiped at her face. She had only just realized that it was still kinda messy looking. Euggh. There was something wrong about being seen post-cry by a teacher who talked about porn in class.

She asked, "Don't you think that maybe, maybe if she tried her hardest, then, someday, you could love her back the same way?"

Iruka shrugged, hopped up to the rail, balanced on the balls of his feet.

"I'm not a compromising type of dude."

Sakura jumped up to the rail too. Her balance was pretty good compared to most of the class (except for Sasuke, who excelled at everything), and anyway, she could certainly stick with her chakra if she felt herself about to fall. With just her toes against the narrow steel, and with the wind blowing around her, it felt like flying.

"At least you two are friends," she muttered. Her shoulders would have drooped, except she had her arms outstretched wide for balance. "I bet you don't tell her she's useless and things. I bet you're not nasty to her."

"Hrmm. Hey, stretch kick slowly, as far you can. Let me see you do a vertical split."

He demonstrated, raising one leg straight up until his knee was pressed against his torso, his foot over his head.

Sakura frowned. Well, she was wearing tights under the skirt and... Anyway, it was pretty obvious that Sensei was into athletic, busty girls. He probably wouldn't perv onto her, right?

"Not too bad. Now, let me see your forms."

"Up here?"

"Up here. Yes, like that. You do have the standard taijutsu forms down quite well. You just don't fight enough to be able to use them in a practical situation."

If she sparred like that, she'd have ugly hands and feet, just like. Well, just like Sakaki-sempai, whose hands had rock-hard calluses on the knuckles, on the edges, at the heel of the palm, even at the fingertips. She admired sempai for her strength, her height, her figure, heck, even her hair... but she could be a lot prettier. Sempai wore no make-up, she didn't bother styling that long, glossy hair, and of course, her nails looked like that of a man. Her clothes were usually baggy and worn, and the few occasions she was witnessed in more figure-flattering attire were usually followed by fights.

"Keep that up for now. Anyway, I was pretty mean to that girl, when we were kids. I used to call her names and things. Made fun of her little boobs."

"You were a jerk."

"I was trying to motivate her. Turn in your back foot ten degrees. More tension in the left elbow. Straighten your back. Anyway, it worked. A little too well."

Sakura would normally be pretty nervous at this point, dancing around several stories above the ground on a length of steel only a couple of inches wide, while being watched by her Sensei one-on-one and with the wind picking up and the lighting getting worse. Right now though, it seemed like the thing to do.

It was stupid, talking about this stuff with the guy. Wasn't he a famous killer? Ugh. Why was she talking about her issues with him? Maybe he'd brainwash all her classmates and turn them into mass murderers through subtle conversations about love and porn and booze. Maybe he'd brainwash her. Didn't they say the Fist of the North Star could do something like that? Sakura promised herself that if he made her start watching porn, or start checking out guys' packages or something, she'd kill herself. She'd sit in a tub and slit her wrists lengthwise and relax and float away.

Perspiration was starting to bead on her brow, between her shoulder-blades, on her chest. Front kick, low block, back fist, back kick, palm thrust. She wobbled a bit on the spin, but managed to keep her feet without cheating and sticking with chakra.

Getting a little short of breath, she got out, "I don't think. Well, I don't think Sasuke is trying to motivate me," she admitted. It wasn't like it was a secret, right? "I guess I'm just not. Not exceptional enough. He sure pays attention to Sakaki-sempai."

"Ah, don't be fooled. He's not like Neji, who really is smitten with Sakaki-chan. Sasuke only looks at her wondering, 'How can I get stronger than this girl? How dare she be this good?' Okay, you're getting tired already? You can stop."

Puffing from the effort, Sakura stepped off the rail back onto the roof. The moon was starting to come up. Below them, the leaves in the trees rustled.

"He's just had a rough childhood," she said. "I guess."

"Oh ho. You're thinking that excuses his personality? Why don't you give Naruto that much slack?"

"Naruto's an idiot and. And he's scary. He's dangerous."

She thought of the few sparring sessions the blond had been allowed to participate in. Inevitably, his sloppy form would get him hit. And then It would come out, red light all over his body. The matches would always stop then. There were rumors that he'd killed a student once, long ago.

"You know," Iruka said, "imagine what other people, at this very moment, are doing."

They could see the lights of the city burning brightly at this point. It made it hard to see the stars.

Right now? Sakura imagined her thoughts stretching out like a hand. No, that was a little creepy. She imagined her thoughts riding along on the wings of a bird, flitting from window to window. She pictured Sasuke in an elegantly furnished little place, full of panels of deeply stained oak and lamps made of polished bronze and black iron, pouring over dusty old scrolls of his family. He would look very intense, very focused. He probably didn't even notice that he was feeling lonely.

Her cheeks turned red. Maybe, at this very moment, Ino was watching Sasuke from right outside his window. Ugh. She should have never told her friend that she liked him.

When had that started anyway? Before, boys were annoying and smelly and dirty and naughty. When she pictured being older, she had pictured being the one stepping on them, laughing coz she would be stronger.

"Right now, Naruto is training very hard. He can't use normal chakra at all, because of what Yondaime did to him. It's such a large thing inside him. It comes out when he's not thinking about it. And for the longest time, there was no one to help him."

"He shouldn't even be trying to be a ninja," Sakura said.

"Well. It's easy to be saying that about someone else, isn't it? But you should try that visualization again. You know, Sasuke is not at all unique in this village, in terms of experiences. You could say this is a city of orphans. I was too, you know. Everyone responds differently. Sasuke's turned inwards, trying to whittle down everything he thinks is not needed, until all that's left, hopefully, is strength. He's a dumb kid though, and actually less mature than even you. That's a brittle kind of strength he's seeking. At least you, well, girls really grow up faster at first."

Sakura thought about how hard that must be. Carving yourself down like a piece of wood. Didn't it hurt to slice away bits of yourself? She supposed that if she felt like she had open wounds all the time from trying to cut oneself down, she'd be touchy and a loner too.

"You know, the girl so many of you kids admire. Sakaki-chan. She feels empty inside, so she spends all her time trying to fill it up with the people she's come to care for."

Empty? How could Sempai be empty? She was amazing. She was stronger than the boys, the most beautiful of the girls, smart and tough and everything, boys and girls, could want to be. And when she thought nobody was paying attention, she was kind, and quiet. There was a stillness to her, a kind of elegance that was natural, unpracticed, unaffected.

"And that moron, Naruto. He hasn't decided who he is yet. Kind of like you. Except you can see hints of who you are and what you're becoming reflected back from how your parents treat you, and all your friends.

"Naruto - until this year, he had nobody. In the mornings, there's no one to wake him up and tell him he's going to be late to school. There's nobody to fix his breakfast or to pack a lunch for him. During breaks, he had no one to talk to before. When he goes home, there's no one waiting for him. There was no one to help him clean, or do groceries, or encourage him when he's feeling down, or to share his moods when he's feeling up.

"For Naruto, life is empty spaces in between the moments when people pay attention. Not so different from you as you think. For you, life is about the spaces filled with the people who care about you, in between stressful times when all you're thinking about are the tests you have to do well at, the things you have to study. But you're lonely too."

Sakura fiddled with her fingers, absently going through all the mudras she knew. She didn't know how to feel about all the stuff Sensei was saying. Her throat felt tight. Maybe, she wanted to cry again a little bit.

"How do you know all that?"

"Huh. Because I've been like Naruto, and I've been like Sasuke, and I've been like Sakaki-chan. And more than ten years ago, when I still had what you'd consider to be a normal family, I was just like you. Except, you know, with a cock."

Before she knew what she was doing, Sakura kicked the railing, hard. Iruka gracefully back-flipped off, grinning.

"Sensei! I was just starting to admire you and then you! Argh."

What was she doing anyway? Her parents were probably waiting for her.

"I'll see you tomorrow, Haruno-chan. You should take it slow, you know? Cherish these days. I see the way you look at Sasuke and Sakaki-chan. Don't be in such a hurry to grow up."

What was that about?

"Yeah, yeah." The words were dismissive, but really this small dose of alone time with Sensei was a lot to take in. She was dizzy, thinking about herself, trying to picture the kind of person she could be, or wanted to be, or could never be. Sakura paused at the stairway, looking down at her hands. They were soft and the fingers were long and slender. They were not hardened weapons like Sempai's.

"Last thing, brat.

"Right now, you're thinking, 'Do I have to be like her to get what I want?' - well, you don't want to be like her, and you can't anyway. Though she doesn't have some special bloodline ability, she has the perfect genetic potential to be a full combat ninja, and she trains as hard as anyone. Even if you trained twice as hard, you would not be able to get her reach, you would not have the same muscle reaction time, you would not get the same bone density. If you put your all into becoming strong, you'd probably be a decent fighter. But you still wouldn't match someone who is just as dedicated and more gifted for that role."

Sakura punched the door, sighed. That's what she thought. She thought of the few times the older classes had done demonstrations, recalled wincing as the teachers took pieces of solid oak as thick around as her forearm and slammed them into Sakaki-sempai's legs and arms and stared in wide-eyed awe as the wooden clubs shattered against her limbs. And that was after one of the Hyuuga students had sealed off Sempai's tenketsu, just to prove to them all that Sakaki was doing it without using any chakra to enhance her flesh and bones. Sakura had cringed when sempai had explained exercises she did to toughen up her hands. Some were relatively ordinary, such as doing push-ups on the first two knuckles of the hands, push-ups on the fingers, and practicing with a makiwara - a wooden board wrapped in heavy rope. And then there were the extreme ones, like driving her fists down into buckets full of packed uncooked grains, and striking her own knuckles with a hammer.

Taking a hammer to your own hands. How much self-control did that take, to steadily torture oneself for the sake of strength? Sakura's mother would screech if she ever saw her daughter doing something like that.

She shook her head, realized that Sensei was still talking to her.

"...more purposes than for combat. It's not all good. For example, because of all the hardening techniques Sakaki-chan uses on her body, as soon as anybody looks at her hands, they will know she is a fighter. Disguise techniques are only useful in the short term - for a long term deep cover assignment, Sakaki-chan could never pose as anything other than a fighter. Not even farmers and carpenters have hands that hard.

"Fighting will always be your weakness, and it's good to try to develop that area. What's more important, however, is to find your talents and focus on them. There are many ways.

"What will you be? I'm not sure yet. I do know you have it in you to be a great ninja, once you figure out how to use that brain of yours. Your own kind of ninja. It's up to you to find out what that is - and along the way, maybe you'll find what you're looking for, or find something better than what you once thought you wanted."

She leaned against the doorway. Sighed again.

"What did you want to be, Sensei? Are you what you always wanted to become?"

"Hrmm. Now that's a very long story. I'll tell you over sake, when you've just made chuunin."

The moon was hiding again, behind thick clouds. The hot air cooled very suddenly. She could taste rain in the air - maybe ten minutes from now. Better to go home and continue her moping and thinking there.

"Um, thanks, Sensei."

What was she thanking him for anyway? But as she walked down the endless steps in the shadowy school, she thought about how miserable she'd been since lunch, and maybe, she supposed, being around an idiot could make one feel better.


	30. Sudden Mission

Heavy banging. No sense of danger.

"Mfrffm. Kurenai-san, just lemme sleep."

Clicks. The creak of an opening door. An Onizuka can sleep through anything, so there - Iruka refused to acknowledge the approaching steps.

Then thick thumbs dug into his temples and turned his head up.

"Agh! Mr. Froggy!"

"Ugh. It would be like that man to teach you no respect at all. And damn it all, I summon toads, not frogs!"

"...So you would prefer Mr. Toady?"

"...I hate you."

"So to what do I owe this honor, oh great novelist?" Iruka grumbled under his breath, was about to close his hands on those thick wrists but Jiraiya quickly backed off.

"Now, now, chuunin of Konoha. There is a mission for you."

Iruka cursed, rolled up onto his feet. Yawned as he stretched out his arms and arched his back to the accompanying sound of popping joints.

"I'm just a lowly teacher now. Get Mr. Awesome Genius or Mr. Green Nuts instead."

The old man sighed, rubbed at his temples, wincing.

"This is a request direct from the Hokage. We have need of the Butcher's skills."

Iruka was about to drop-kick the guy through the window and creep back into his gray-green sleeping bag, when he paused and thought about it some more. It had been a while since he had needed to apply his skills in a real-world situation. Also, the fucking teacher's salary was goddamn laughable! He really wanted to buy one of those scary-looking, thundering, two-wheeled death machines that Lee's father was studying and rebuilding, and that would cost quite a bit. He did not want to touch the investments he'd made - he still planned to expand Bro's building in the future, and the construction costs would be huge.

"Mission pay?"

"It's an off-the-books mission, as you probably guessed. It is unclassifiable - we'll pay twice the standard A-rank fee, and you will also be paid the bounty for the target in one month's time, again, off the books."

"Hrmm."

That was a lot. Enough to get one of those deafening ancient motor-things.

"The target is extremely dangerous, and belongs to an organization of equally dangerous men. He's here, tonight, evaluating our defenses. He needs to die, so that one of ours can infiltrate the group and take that man's place."

Iruka frowned.

"Who gets that shitty assignment?"

"I don't know. The Hokage doesn't tell me everything, but I have my suspicions. Anyway, the target's death must seem natural, or there will be additional scrutiny when our mole attempts to join."

Ahh. Now he could see why they needed his skills.

"So. I'm guessing that he needs to die in one month, from a seemingly natural cause. One that leaves no trace of poison, no lingering battle-wound, nothing that can be interpreted by a medic-ninja."

Mr. Froggy nodded.

"The opportunity is closing as we speak. He is only here for one night."

"All right. I can do this, if you have the intelligence."

"There is no written file. You and I will go to a night club he is at, right now, where he is currently being... detained... by the local entertainment. You'll know who immediately - it will be the man getting attention from two lovely girls at once. A mother and a daughter."

No. Iruka's eyes glittered, hardened as he pressed points around his heart, to calm himself and also quickly erase the fuzziness of sleep. There was only one high class stripper in Konoha who had a daughter old enough to do this, while still being pretty enough herself to keep doing that. He put out his hands, stretched out each finger.

"You assholes. Putting them in danger like that... And I know there's no way the daughter would take a mission like this unless - "

"Yeah, yeah, it's true. This is her jounin exam."Jiraiya saw that look, backed away, palms up. "It wasn't my idea, and it wasn't the Hokage's, to use them."

"...If they get hurt because of this mission, I will track down whoever came up with this shit plan and cripple them. I will leave just enough so that my Master has enough left to work with to teach them a new definition of pain, one they have never imagined."

Jiraiya cleared his throat. "The mission and the mission-planning was assigned to her, Onizuka. There was no time for something elaborate - we only found out about the opportunity today. It was her decision to go in as a dancer, to get intel and try to keep him there, and her mother's decision to go with her. It was also her evaluation that only you could carry out the actual assassination."

Well, shit. Iruka could just imagine how that conversation went. Kurenai would have a cold, irritated expression on her, say something like, "Mom, I need to be able to... I need to be a dancer for a mission. Tonight. Your kind of dancing."

And Tomoko would say, "I've been wanting to teach you this stuff for years. But I'm going with you. You'd mess it up without me."

Or something like that. Probably a much longer argument involving lots of weeping and drama, before Kurenai even got to hastily learning how to do a striptease in a professional capacity. This had to be killing her though, having to use her looks for a mission's needs, to do something she considered debasing. For Tomoko, stripping was fun, liberating and empowering, but for Kurenai, it was an insult to women, etc. etc. and so on and so forth.

Iruka was already pulling off his pants and shirt. He dug through one of the bottom drawers in his desk where he kept a spare change of 'partying clothes.' There. Black silk shirt, cream slacks, white leather shoes. Couldn't pretend to be a customer at that club without looking nice. Actually, he should have realized this was why the so-called Toad Sage was better-dressed than usual and not in his stupid geta and whites and red vest and head-plate combo as soon as he'd seen him. Rather dashing, really, with his long white hair brushed and pulled back in some semblance of order, and gray linen shirt, charcoal pants, red tie.

"Let's go, Jiraiya-san. You better pray that Bro doesn't find out about this, or he'll kill the old man. Casual walk?"

"Casual walk. There's time," Jiraiya said, checking his diamond-studded watch. "Tomoko's dance is just starting. Kurenai will dance after her, and then they'll approach the target together to offer the 'exclusive' service."

"Let's take the shortcut. There are two times this can happen, a larger window while he's watching the show up to when they go to the private rooms, and a smaller window when he's leaving the club."

Down on the street, they were walking, not too fast, not too slow.

Iruka had to admit to himself that he did miss this, just a little. He was good at this. Assassination was his trade just as much as open combat. He could make it look like a heart-attack, a stroke, kidney failure, liver disease, any of dozens of obscure diseases. Many combinations of Tsubo did not take effect for hours or days. Bro had developed one particularly refined combination that took ten years to kill, producing an excruciatingly painful, slow death as the entire nervous system went crazy and was steadily overwhelmed by pain signals.

Iruka would get some drinks, spill one on himself, pretend to be tipsy as he'd shove his way to the stage. He would only need to be in arm's reach of the target for an instant. He wouldn't need anything so fancy as the Ten Year Vengeance. He liked to vary what he used, just to ensure that there wasn't a tell-tale pattern.

Since this guy was dangerous enough to need this much attention, he would use a deluxe method though - Iruka would give the target a weakened spot in one of the crucial blood flows in the brain that would start out undetectably. After three weeks, the aneurysm would quickly change gear, growing much more rapidly, until the fourth week passed and it burst. Only the very greatest of medic-nin would have a chance of even finding it before the target died - it would only be detectable in the last few hours before the man died.

If Iruka could deliver it quickly enough, maybe Kurenai wouldn't even have to dance. Although... she tried so hard to be cold and calculating and hard-assed that she would probably go through with it anyway, to get info if she could, even if she received the signal that the target was already dying. Ugh. It was probably going to drive her crazy when she danced up there and she saw him approaching. Iruka had always wanted to see her up on a stage, beautiful scowl, sweat-slicked skin shining in the bright lights, black curls cascading down her back up to the curving lines of her hard little buttocks gyrating, that slender body gliding along atop her long legs on dangerously tall heels, less sensual than her mother, probably, but more graceful.

Ah, hell. Finally going to get to see Tomoko's girl's girls and he needed to be so focused in mission mode that he wouldn't really be able to enjoy the sight.

He would be worried until the target was finally out of the club and she and her mother were still alive. Then he could laugh in relief, chat her up, drink with her mom, tease her for finally cutting loose her inhibitions. He'd spend a minute waxing poetic about the color of her nipples, the shadows of the cleft of her sex. She would throw beer at him, maybe, and yell at him. That would be fine.

"Looking too serious there, 'buddy.' We're out for a fun time, aren't we?"

"...Right." He tried to grin, just mangled the smile instead. It took a few attempts to smooth his face into something like a natural smile, trying to focus on how it usually felt when he got to watch Tomoko. "I hope there was some kind of plan in case Bro felt like going to the club tonight. As soon as he sees Kurenai, he'll know something's up and people will start getting killed."

"Your Bro is currently cussing up a storm, dealing with a busted boiler in the basement and leaking pipes, right in the middle of his attempt to cook up a romantic dinner."

"I hope whoever did that was good."

"Of course he was good. I did it. I didn't even go into the building - I caused a pressure build up from outside, one of many elemental techniques that the young ones hardly bother learning anymore because they keep focusing on fancy, flashy combat stuff."

"You'll have to teach me that one sometime."

After this, Tomoko would go to the apartment he and his Bro shared, pretend it was just an ordinary night of work before she would tenderly kiss her man. Kurenai would go home, suffering the mixed feelings of getting promoted but at the cost of compromising her beliefs, and extra-pissed off that Iruka would have seen her naked (and hopefully just a bit confused at realizing the subtle power she could hold over men just with her looks).

In Iruka's pockets, his hands clenched, death in the fingertips. Just so long as they didn't die...

Man. He hoped he would be able to get some sleep before class.


	31. Stupid Kids

Everyone was acting... very strange.

Usually, when they whispered things to each other and gave those meaningful looks and laughed in that smarmy, condescending way, it had something to do with him.

But today, Naruto had gone to class early for once, and was sitting, uselessly thinking about yesterday's lecture about bunshin jutsu. Useless. He could not use normal techniques because of his crazy chakra. Even with the exercises he'd been doing with Sakaki and her friends, he could not do a jutsu worth shit. At least he wasn't popping out claws and tails of light at random moments anymore. And then he cringed internally, imagining Chiyo-chan, pigtails bobbing as she'd smack him a good one, saying 'You may not be able to do techniques through handseals, but you should understand the theory. There are still a lot of ways you can use your light if you could just think about it.'

He shook his head. Maybe he was hanging out with Sakaki's group too much - they were starting to talk in his head when they weren't even around. He couldn't count the number of times he was just about to do a prank and he'd imagine Sakaki's gentle, disapproving voice.

Anyway, pay attention to the surroundings, idiot! Something was up.

It was a little weird, not being the object of the majority's disdain for once.

It took Naruto time to figure out who the target was. Between the fragments of people talking that he heard (it's not like anyone in his own class talked to him), and which seat in class got the pointed looks, it wasn't all that hard.

And he was puzzled, sure he'd sensed it wrong.

Wasn't Sakura one of the popular girls now? What was with everybody?

What clinched it was when she walked in and the murmuring went up a notch. And when she sat at her desk, opened a folded note stuck to it, and turned red, then pale, then red again, and a little teary, before fleeing the room.

Pshh. If people were this gullible, he ought to have started some rumors about all the jerks he hated.

The door crashed open and without further ado, Iruka-sensei greeted everybody with a morning: "Everbody shut the fuck up! Read chapter so-and-so. Whatever it was we were talking about at the end of the day yesterday. If you wake me up for less than a life and death matter, I'll kill you." And with that, Iruka sat at his desk up at the front of the room, put up a giant textbook opened to the middle, lay his head on his arms behind the book, and commenced snoring. What a way to start the day.

Huh. Last night must have been one of those nights for Sensei. When he went on a bender the night before, the next day, he would be too miserable to sleep, but with his super-sensitive ears, he wouldn't take the slightest bit of shit from the students (when normal, Sensei himself would often be the instigator of the contagious "Stupid-Shit-Syndrome"). But this behavior, he didn't understand yet.

"You wondering why he couldn't sleep, right?"

Okay, this was really weird. A damned unusual event, definitely.

"Uh? Why are you talking to me?"

"I was wondering if you knew, since you're friends with Sakaki-sempai's bunch, and they're Iruka-sensei's favorites. I thought, maybe you could confirm my deductions, or say flat out, 'No Shikamaru, you made a mistake' - in which case I'd have to further refine my observational skills with regard to Sensei."

Naruto stood up, checked his ass to see if somehow he had missed sitting on some thumbtacks. Then he checked his bag to see if there was poo or bugs in it. He patted his back - nothing taped to it. Then he pressed his hands together, focused that disturbing red chakra of his, eyes turning a solid bright red, ears becoming longer, tapering to fine points.

"Err. Uzumaki-san, normally I can figure you out pretty easy, but what the Hell?"

"I'm just checking to see if either someone has already hit me with a genius-level prank, or I'm flat out being hit with a genjutsu."

"Paranoid..."

"No, I'm a survivor. So either I can't break this illusion, which takes quite a bit more doing since Osaka-chan started hitting me with hers, or I'm having a really weird day. It's pretty nice. Uh. So, what were you going to ask?"

So, Shikamaru had also paid attention. He presented his theory, and the supporting evidence, and asked Naruto, "So was that right?"

...Amazing.

"Are you a stalker or what?" Naruto had to ask.

"No. I guess that means I was right. Now I can go back to sleeping also."

"Actually, I dunno. It sounds good. But I don't train at Sensei's dojo, you know? It would be better for you to ask Sakaki-sempai." Made sense. If Sensei slept in the mornings and was bad-tempered, well, didn't it make sense for it to be because of some woman? "Well. Then again. You know, I don't think you're right, on second thought."

And so, the boy with the weirdest none-styled natural hair in their class shrugged, turned away to return to his seat, turned around again.

"Hey though - why DON'T you think it means Sensei just got lucky the night before?"

"...He'd just take the day off completely."

"Ahh. I suppose so. But he usually seems so enthusiastic about his way of 'teaching' - I think he'd go anyway."

"But then he'd probably talk about sex during class."

"Hmm. I do believe you're right, Uzumaki. Means I need to do more research."

Huh.

Naruto started walking himself. If there was going to be a two or three hour period of self-study, he might as well do it outside where it was nice and sunny. By the time lunch came around, the clouds would probably move in or it might already be flat out raining again.

"Ei, Uzumaki."

Uh? Wasn't the lazy guy back asleep yet?

"Yes?"

Shikamaru paused and, still close enough for Naruto to hear it, said in a low, not-quite whisper, "You might want to go look for Haruno. She's not used to being teased like that anymore. For you, it's nothing. This attention - she's probably pretty miserable."

The hell! Why should he care? Naruto tilted his head, and pointed to himself, eyes blinking.

"Ino would do it if she was here, but she's home. She was pretty traumatized from that shit's yelling at them yesterday."

Naruto pointed his other index finger at himself. "Err. So why should I care, again?"

"Oh? Huh. And I thought for sure you had such a crush on her. Nevermind, nevermind."

...Goddamnit.

"Don't say that so fricking loud! I was just going out to fricking smoke a cigarette! You got that?" Naruto hissed.

His hand was on Shikamaru's shirt, close to the collar, lifting the taller boy up onto his toes. A single red blade stretched out from his other hand, which was closed into a fist. Jeez. It was a good thing there had still been a 'safety radius' around him that morning - nobody wanted to sit next to him. If not for that, he would probably have to kill some witnesses, or at least punish them to the point of total misery, make them cry so hard they'd PRETEND to forget they heard anything.

"Ohh. I see how it is. Well, it's up to you anyway, doesn't really make a difference to me." The jerk said that, but dropped a little notebook that flipped open, revealing maps and a timeline and a couple of pictures.

Naruto let go, took a step back.

"Oh, how careless of me," Shikamaru said, picking it up and closing it right in Naruto's view, where he could see pictures of himself following a distant figure with pink hair. There were quite a few other pictures too.

"...You're evil."

"No, I'm smart."

"...Do you got one of those notebooks for everyone in class?"

"Only the strong ones, Uzumaki-san."

"...I think we should get to be friends, lazy-boy."

Shikamaru grinned. "I'm everybody's friend, Uzumaki-san."

"Well. I'm off then."

Argh. Now he was stuck wandering all over the place looking for that dumb chick when he had just wanted to get to that nice stone table in the eastern field that caught a lot of morning sun and was pleasantly warm at just this time, perfect to sit and kick back at and smoke.


	32. Loosened Up

"You look completely wiped out, Oni. I thought last night was an easy kill for you?"

Iruka shook his head, dragged the glass just close enough to his face that he could suck on the long straw without picking his head up off his forearm.

"You didn't read my report? The target did not have a normal body composition. Something I could only detect after the first contact. Had to do a second attempt just to figure out what was different with his body, and a third one when he was leaving to deliver my revised attack."

Kurenai swung her feet, tapping one against the bar and her heel against the stool's steel frame. Pushed a lock of hair from her forehead. "So what was different with his body?"

"Extreme modification, multiply redundant Tsubo and chakra coils, damage diverting seals, extra hearts. I wasn't quite able to give the thirty day delay that the mission originally called for. At best, he will last ten days before he suffers a massive burst aneurysm that's more than his body can handle. He still might not die - but even if he survives, he should have extreme brain damage. The only consolation is that his body is so heavily modified in the first place that my failed attacks will probably be hidden from anyone doing an autopsy amongst all the experimental stuff in there."

He took a deep breath, let it out. Sipped vodka through a straw, wincing.

"It used up a lot of my energy, bypassing the system of Tsubo and chakra coils controlling the hearts. A lot. The guy was a monster - actually one of the few cases where it would have been easier for me to kill him in an open fight than through an assassination technique. If I didn't have to hide it, I could just cut all the hearts to pieces in open battle."

Then Iruka paused, thinking about the complexity of that system. "Haha, shouldn't get too full of myself. It would have been a tough fight too. Those modifications in his body - I bet he can use those to control multiple elemental affinities simultaneously, maybe bloodlines too, through those stolen hearts. He's quite a beast."

"Mm." She took a sip of her own drink, a colorful, fruity-looking thing that smelled way too sweet to Iruka. "I made the right call then, asking for you. Nobody else would have had a chance of succeeding."

Head still down, Iruka shoved his glass towards hers, lightly clinking them.

"Congratulations, again, jounin girl."

She blushed badly.

"Uh. I, uh. Thanks for not telling Anko about the, uh. Mission details."

"Oh believe me, I have all the details committed to memory. Ow, hey, stop with the pinching! Let go of my cheek already, yeesh. Don't worry about it. Jiraiya made sure that there were no other ninja in the club that night, and only he, the Hokage, and you and I know about the mission. Anyway, not like I could talk about the... details..." he paused, savoring the flush on her cheeks that went all the way down her neck and the upper faces of her breasts, "because Anko would know instantly that it would have had to be a majorly important mission to make you do that. And, she's my best bud and all, but she cannot keep her mouth shut. Anyway, you looked really different, with the dyed hair and the contacts and the make-up. Even now, I can't really believe it was you I was watching."

He knew he had a totally lecherous grin on right then, so he didn't mind when she grit her teeth and did a mighty double-pinch, one on each cheek.

"So, you spent the morning getting a hair cut and then coloring it black again, etc., right. A good move. Last night, an amateur from out of town with long red hair and green eyes tried out with the famous Tomoko, and decided she didn't like the business after all. Today, the black-haired, red-eyed Kurenai, happy with her promotion, decided to have a haircut to change her style, and not just that for a makeover, but new clothes too."

She shifted from side to side, tugged down at the hem of her dress.

"I, umm. Feel really exposed still. But I thought, this isn't really that bad."

"Bet your Mom was so happy she bought you a whole new wardrobe."

"Uh. I, um. I guess, you know, it wouldn't be so bad to make her a little happier, if it's just, um, wearing nicer clothes. Ah, nuts. I feel like an idiot."

Iruka lifted her head just for a moment to smile at her, let himself droop back down onto the bar. "You did good last night. No other Konoha ninja could have done it. The other qualified kunoichi are assigned elsewhere or either too inexperienced or already well-known enough that they would have been recognized. You analyzed the situation, came up with a plan, and carried it out. You got information out of a rather deadly enemy, and nobody knows. Well done, jounin."

She put her head down on the counter too.

"I was scared. I fucked up. I nearly got Mom killed."

"But you didn't."

Kurenai shivered.

It was bad to be turned on when he was supposed to be comforting her, but even peering at her with one eye, just enough of one of her fine breast was visible through the wide opening in the side of the dress for her arm that it was really quite stirring when she'd move and the curve would move too. Oh well.

"I just got so freaked out when a few of these... thread things... came out of his body, went up along my, my thighs. I almost tried to fight. Mom... kissed him, pressed her body against the tendrils, just smiled and said, 'I've seen weirder stuff - I bet those are real nice to use in bed, mm?' If she hadn't kept his eyes on her right then, I'd have blown it."

Oooh, what a sight that must have been! Err. Yes, have to focus. How did he ever develop a stupid liking for tentacle porn? "Your Mom is braver than people think, you know? Also, well, she really has seen quite a few odd things, giving lap-dances in a ninja town. You should hear the stories she tells when she cooks dinner for me and Bro. The filth she was saying in front a young, impressionable kid like I was," he smiled. "I bet you always just yelled at her to shut up when she'd do that."

She lifted her glass, tilted it, watched the multicolored fluid swirl, slow patterns like a sandstorm.

"I made such a big deal about it before, you know? So she just stopped talking about her day. She'd only talk about the past, when she was a ninja, because she knew I liked hearing about that. I always wondered what made her give it up, why she preferred... dancing instead - and why'd it have to be like that? Why not something with value, something deep, something that's art?"

He shrugged.

"It's art to her."

They went through a couple more drinks in silence, munched indifferently on the bits of deep-fried squid they had ordered and kept ordering more of.

This late at night - well, this late into the low hours of the morning, the only other customers left at the bar were the serious drinkers - either long-term alcoholics, or people drinking due to a recent or imminent event. There was a salary man crying quietly in the far corner, at the darkest table. A handful of retired jounin took up a prominent position in the middle of the bar, quietly playing another round of poker while they went through pitchers of weak beer. A pair of girls that looked too young to be in the bar kept gazing out the window, like they were still waiting for somebody.

What did he and Kurenai look like? Iruka pushed the straw out of his mouth, came upright enough to tilt back another burning slug of clear vodka. Signaled for a refill. Probably, sitting so close to each other, enclosed in a very obvious silencing jutsu, heads leaning towards each other to catch whispers even inside the subtle barrier technique, they looked like lovers talking their way through a break-up.

"Who do you think it is, Oni?"

"I'm trying not to think about it."

Kurenai licked her greasy fingers, looked glumly at the fingerprints left on her glass. He could see the doubts flitting through her, with the changes in her eyes. Had they missed anything? Did the target really leave without noticing Iruka's attack? Was the info she'd gotten even remotely accurate? Was this mission really important to Konoha, or had she just given up on her principles for the sake of a quick promotion?

"From all the pieces around this mission, it's a big one. And so many unofficial bits."

"You should stop thinking about it too."

She flicked a finger hard against his forehead. It stung, but he was much too drained to follow through on his instinctive response, which would have been to poke her in a ticklish spot he well knew was there since she was a kid.

Almost to herself, Kurenai murmured, "He would have to be pretty good, whoever the infiltrator will be. That creepy guy you've just assassinated - haha, will assassinate, ten days from now? Or is he already dead, and just doesn't know it? From the things you say about his body modifications, he must be extremely powerful. Our man would have to be able to match that, in order to replace him."

"You really should stop. Even your silencing techniques are imperfect. What if we're being watched by random people who can lip-read, who might know enough to put it together?"

"Please," she frowned, "I'm not an idiot. There's a visual genjutsu woven into it too. The shadows cast by the light above us are intensified. Our mouths are indistinct in darkness. The only techniques that can penetrate this aren't exactly subtle, or require bloodline junk that you can sense."

"I never said I can sense bloodline activations."

"Oh, come on, Oni. I've tried to avoid doing missions with you, but I've been on enough. It's pretty obvious that you can."

Great. If Kurenai could figure it out from so little exposure, there must be plenty of their other colleagues that had worked it out too.

"Anyway, you can stop scowling so fiercely. It doesn't matter. I can't figure out how you do it. It's just one more of the many mysterious reasons your fighting arts are so desired by every ninja village on the continent."

Hmm. His mouth was getting pretty dry. He was getting quite high. Took some doing, with his natural tolerance, and his size. Clearing his throat, Iruka stuck his head out of the field of Kurenai's technique and called to... oh man, was that Chiyo-chan? Heck. He really needed to figure out a better financial aid package for her. She was working all kinds of jobs still, even on top of the extra training. Her schoolwork was still excellent, but he knew she was always tired in class, and not at her best.

"Ermm. Yeah, Sensei?"

"Is that... is that one of your students, Oni? What is she doing here?"

"Hey, stop with the disapproving frown, rookie jounin. You know who this is and the why, if you'd care to think about it."

"She shouldn't be - "

"Chiyo-chan, I'm on the edge of getting drunk. Please. A pitcher of water, and another glass. Get her another one too."

"Umm. Okay," the little girl said, bustling about, using wire techniques to retrieve objects out of her reach on the upper shelves, so little that only her head poked out over the level of the counter. The pitchers looked gigantic in her tiny hands. "Here, Sensei."

Iruka gulped down a glass immediately, sighed, smiled at her, patted her head. She did look more serious, when she had her 'working' look on - whatever uniform was appropriate to the job she was on at the time, she did her best to look, if not older, at least more mature. Right now, she was in an adorable outfit, shiny black flats, black slacks, white shirt with a black tie, and a red vest over it. She never kept her hair in her signature pigtails while she was working, allowing its sweeping waves to sway freely against her cheeks and neck, and wore just a hint of make-up around her eyes, and on her lips.

Sticking his head out of the silencing field one more time, Iruka told her, "Hey kid. It's your last year. You should at least try to avoid the jobs that work you this late, hmm?"

"I'm only on late shift for this week, Sensei. Don't worry, I'm not falling behind - "

"I know. But it's bad for you to be so tired all the time. Try to get more sleep or I'll have to cut back on your training hours at the Dojo, okay?"

Chiyo-chan bit her lip, utter cuteness despite herself. "I'll try. But it's just so tough. Sensei, can you... I know you don't have 'official' control over teams, but... when I graduate, my team - our leader has to be willing to toss us into at least b-ranked missions right away. It's... the money runs out right then, sensei, so please..."

Iruka hoped he had a kindly sort of smile on.

"Of course, Chiyo-chan. I already have someone in mind, and he's indicated that he's willing. He will also teach you to be strong, okay? And I know you've been obsessing about it non-stop, wondering if you had to drop to average rank and get Osaka to drop to rock-bottom. Relax, whatever grades you three get, you will stay a team. The Hokage already agreed."

Of course he agreed. This way, an entire TEAM of Konoha ninja would get to learn one of the Nanto Seiken styles. Sandaime was an idealist and rather against the idea of a team being groomed from the start to be combat and assassination specialized... but he could not turn down the chance of having more ninja that would learn at least some of the Onizuka secret arts.

"Thanks, Sensei. Uh, I gotta go back to work now - the poker-players want another round."

"See you later, Chiyo-chan."

Iruka put his head back on the counter-top, inside Kurenai's obfuscation space.

"You're so close to them," she said, shaking her head.

"I know you think I'm a bad teacher, but - "

"Well, I did at first," Kurenai broke in, "but I can't argue with results. Mizuki doesn't know how you do it. And I... I've never been able to have that kind of rapport with the little brats."

He laughed. Kurenai, envious of his teaching skills? He really had to be a genius. "Must be because I'm still just a brat too."

Woah. Her hand on his thigh. Even almost sloshed, it made him much more aware of his boner.

"Ahem. Hey there, Yuuhi-kun."

She was still thinking too hard. "Iruka. There's only one guy who's missing with the skills - "

His hand over her mouth.

"Don't. I don't want to hear it. If it's that guy... then we were wrong about him. And if we were wrong about him, that says something about this Village, and about the Hokage, and. I don't want to think about something that could make me question my loyalty."

Kurenai finished the last of her drink, then gulped down her glass of water. Her hand was still on his thigh. Maybe a little higher even.

"Hey, now. Um. Are you quite clear on what you're doing, rookie jounin?"

She put down her glass, smiled at him weakly.

"I'm just feeling lonely tonight, Kohai. Maybe you should walk your superior home? It's... right now, Mom is... she's with your Bro again, and you don't really want to sleep on the floor of the school's faculty lounge in a lousy sleeping bag a second night in a row, right? Anyway, don't you feel close to me? You've already seen all there is to see, haven't you?"

Her face was so close, and so warm-looking. Soft. Her lips were still wet from the sip she'd just taken, and her tongue slid lightly around the corner of her mouth.

With speed he wasn't sure he still had with a blood alcohol level this high, Iruka managed to back away, stood up, hand rubbing sheepishly at the back of his head. Tossed some money on the counter.

"Haha, oh, man. You don't know how often I've wanted to hear you say something like that. But, uh. I don't want that to happen just because you're depressed and we're both kinda tipsy. So... So, lemme call Anko-chan and she can come get you, okay? I'll... I should be getting back to the school. I might have left a door unlocked, stupid me."

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Now she looked wan and forlorn. He'd better get going before his resistance completely crumbled.

Yeesh, and even if she couldn't hear anything, Chiyo-chan wasn't exactly low on the perceptiveness scale and could probably deduce quite a bit just from watching their body-language. Even more reason to be seen leaving separately from Kurenai, before they started... making out or something... right there. Because she had never worn a red dress before, never looked as lovely as she did at that moment, and if he closed his eyes, he could picture her perfectly while she had danced, expanses of creamy flesh, slick and shiny, rivulets of sweat streaking down between her breasts, along her back, down her long, long legs, and he was freaking horny and he just knew that it shouldn't be this way.

Maybe Kurenai could see some of that in his eyes too, because she was blushing now, looking away.

"Y-yeah. I guess so. Later, Kohai."

"Later, Sempai."


	33. What are we?

Girls were so weird.

"Ah, there you are! I was kind of getting worried."

Well, he really almost didn't show. I mean, he didn't promise or nothing - he just said, maybe he would walk her to school in the mornings.

"Quit scowling like that. On second thought," she paused as she slung her book bag up to her shoulder, locked the door to her home, "keep scowling. It works for you, right? Maybe I should learn to scowl like that."

She scrunched up her face. It was a great attempt to be scary, for a first try.

Naruto had to ask it. "Why are you doing this?"

"I'm trying to see if this is who I am or not."

No way. This definitely wasn't her. Who was she trying to fool? Wearing dark blue slacks, a loose blue coat that was baggy in some places but snug in others, heavy boots. It emphasized her trim waist, gave the illusion that her shoulders were bigger, made her hips seem narrower, her legs longer.

The most extreme was, well. It made his eyebrow twitch to look at.

"I can't believe you did that to your hair. Didn't your mommy freak out on you?"

Sakura ran her fingers through her newly hacked-up black hair. It was short and spikey in places, with sections that were longer, wild, and a few locks drooped over one side of her forehead and stopped just short of her right eye. It was a totally dramatic look, the black hair, and then the pale skin, and the green eyes, which were more intensely green than ever.

"She and Dad are busy all the time. They don't notice if I use a Henge the few hours we're together. And when they see this look, well, they think this is the Henge."

Ah, cripes. He wanted to hurt Sasuke now. The hell did he say? Now the cutest girl in class had transformed herself into... well, different.

"Haha, I guess it works. You're looking at me differently, aren't you?" she said. "I'm not cute and girly like this, right?"

"Err." It would be way too weird for Naruto to tell her that she still looked good. Just... handsome, instead of pretty. "Well, uh, yeah."

"Great. Let's go."

Walking together like this, he was lost in thinking about how this was exactly nothing like how he had ever imagined walking to school with Sakura-chan. Not that she looked like a 'Sakura-chan' like this.

"Why are you doing this? Is it coz of what those jerks were saying? How will this help?"

"Pshh," she said. "Yeah, it's true, I did follow Sakaki-sempai around some. And before that, I followed around Ino before she decided to cultivate me. But I know I'm not a lesbian - I just get fascinated by people. At the same time. I thought, you know. I don't know who I'm going to be yet, or even who I want to be. I thought I did, but then - everything I envisioned about tomorrow had to do with Sasuke. How I'd look next to him, what I'd be doing, what we'd be talking about. And then it got to me... I stopped imagining the Sakura of tomorrow I used to when I was smaller."

Like that, with her lips pursed that way, she still looked... her mouth looked better like this. But it was so weird, with the mannish clothes. If he did not know this was Sakura-chan, was not already familiar with her smell (now subtly changed by a switch to a men's cologne), he would have thought, well. Pretty boy. Or not. Shit. Naruto wanted to ram his head into one of the street lamps they passed.

"So," he said, hesitantly. Ugh, he couldn't even talk like himself with her like this. "So, uh. This mean you've given up on that Uchiha guy?"

"Ah. I guess I have. But you know, when I think of his face - " and then her eyes softened and her lips changed again, and her hips changed their motion, and Naruto almost walked into a garbage can he was so distracted as she continued speaking, "I still see these dreamy, fogged-up visions, and I guess I still have this weird thing for him. But why, you know? I decided, I want a bad makeover, to someone a little tougher, and if I work hard at school and train a little harder, spend a little less time trying to look good, maybe I can get a clearer picture of tomorrow's Sakura."

"You think about this stuff way too much. We're just kids." Hmm. Well. This wasn't all bad. He cleared his throat, "Is this because of Catgirl-sempai?"

Sakura shrugged. "No, well, not completely. I mean, I'm not going to be spending several hours a day just banging my hands into things, not me. But seeing sempai, and realizing, gosh, even you know her better than anyone else in our year... and realizing, even like this, I know more about her than I do about the real me. That's just sad. She's exactly who she is, and I'm..." she waved her hands in vague circles, "not anybody in particular."

Naruto cleared his throat, kicked a pebble out of the way.

"You've got the wrong idea if you think sempai just ignores her appearance."

"What do you mean?"

"She's never had a reason to try to make herself look particularly nice, you know? But when she drops by to check up on me... hey, don't give me that look!"

Sakura was frowning intensely. "What is between you two anyway? Yuck, you're way not cool enough to be Sakaki-sempai's boyfriend!"

His jaw dropped. "No! No way! Nothing like that at all. Just... Ugh, it's. It's just not that, okay?"

She shrugged, relaxed, swung her arms just a bit more vigorously than she normally did, widened her stride, squared her shoulders more, and like that, the girl he'd quietly considered the cutest for the longest time disappeared behind a new face, someone a little tougher, a little scary. It gave him this weird urge to bite her exposed earlobes, which he did not understand at all.

"Anyway, uh. Anyway, what was I saying? So, sempai. When she checks up on me, coz apparently I'm an idiot and need looking after or something... Anyway, sometimes, it's after a hard training session at the Dojo. Sometimes, while she's at my place, she pokes needles into her ears, you know?"

"Huh?" Sakura slowed down, looked at him odd. A little of the old her peeked out.

"Ah, right, how would you know! It's all the grappling practice she does. She gets her ears smashed against tatami mats a lot. So, to keep from getting messed up cauliflower ears like the old guys at the Dojo have, she sticks needles in there to drain fluid. It's freaking gross! And it looks like it hurts. And sometimes, her nose gets busted up, and she fixes it herself coz she can't afford going to the hospital all the time. She sets it herself, uses medical jutsu on it to keep it straight."

Naruto looked up at the sky as he kept walking.

"And when she trains me and well, you know, if I hold back any she completely crushes me, so I go all out," he smiled nastily when her eyes widened at the red light coalescing around his shoulders into extra arms terminating in terrible, hooked blades, "and she gets cut up."

Some of the pedestrians yelped as his arms almost brushed at them, and he just grinned cheekily at their offended looks, dismissed the power that no longer always came with feelings of aggression and fear.

"Wow. Not, 'wow' because she gets cut up - wow, you can manipulate that weird chakra a lot faster than before."

It still made him feel terrible when she'd get hurt. But not too much now. Not when he experienced how much tougher she was than him at this point.

"Eh. Sempai and her friends have been pushing this thing I've got to the limits of what I can think about for it. I can make it into different things, use it to move, and stuff. Right now, Mihama-san is pushing me very hard to try to change its color, says if I manage that, I can easily be the top student of my year, but it's very hard and I don't understand what she's planning."

Sakura's brow twitched a bit. "Sometimes, you seem very smart, and sometimes you're stupid. Well. If you can manage that level of control of your light and you still can't figure out why Mihama-sempai says that, I'll give you some hints. And don't think I didn't notice. You're distracting me from what we were talking about."

So much for that. "Right, right. Well, after all those fights, for hours afterwards, Sakaki-sempai does all kinds of stuff. Special herbal pastes to clean and disinfect the wounds. And everyday while the cuts heal, she uses medical techniques to keep the skin even, keep the collagen underneath from getting lumpy."

Man, he learned a lot even just from the aftermath of fighting with Cat-girl-sempai and her friends. He grimaced, recalling all the extra book-learning Chiyo-chan forced on him so that he would understand the things Cat-girl did.

"She wants to be able to look good someday for someone, you see? She's just waiting for then. Right now she doesn't care enough to dress fancy or wear makeup or nothing, but she wants to be able to."

The look she was giving him was even weirder than before.

"What about her hands?"

Well, now that got even tougher to explain, because he wasn't clear on that bit at all himself. "Uh, that's a little less straight. See, for sempai, her hands are weapons. To her, keeping them in good condition is the same as making them pretty. So... when she's walking along and smacking a rock into her knuckles or when she's at home hitting them against things, well. She's just keeping her weapons sharp."

"You're just an idiot."

"Hey!"

"But you're not a bad guy, I guess."

They slid through the people walking up and down the streets as they made their way to the Academy.

Then the clouds, which up to then had been hazy and thin, raced along in front of glowering, heavy darkness.

"Oh, crud," Sakura yelped, "I didn't bring an umbrella! Did you?"

"Nooo, but - "

"Come on!"

She grabbed Naruto and they ran for a bit, took shelter under the awning of a store that hadn't opened yet for the morning. It wasn't much shelter - the rain was being driven in, sweeping at them under the flapping canvass above them.

It did not begin with a light drizzle that steadily intensified as with the softer monsoon rains. This was a storm that opened suddenly with a flash of light and the crack of thunder, and then poured on solid, drifting curtains of wet behind a wind that whipped water right into the eyes.

"Aww. We're soaked. I gotta go home and change and we'll be late."

"Why not wear the stuff in your locker at the Academy?"

Sakura shook her head vigorously - the short locks sent water spattering around, didn't droop all that much. "They're all dresses and. You know, my old stuff. I want to try this look for a while."

"Err. Or we can walk in like this and make more of an impression that way, right?"

She chewed on that for a while, as rain splattered them further.

"That's not a bad idea. Let's go then!" she said, a big grin that was so much more real than the little smiles she used to wear all the time.

Running along at her side, water splattering up and soaking their pants, he couldn't help laughing when she started to chuckle.

And then he realized, "I'm an idiot. Haruno, wait up!" He tugged at her hand so they were standing on the sidewalk while around them, people in umbrellas stalked along, and in the middle of the road, carts dragged along by horses and oxen shared space with combustion engine-driven trucks.

Naruto raised his other hand above their heads, and concentrated.

"Not that I care since we can't get more wet than we already are," Sakura said, "but what are we doing?"

"I'm fucking stupid, that's all."

It started as the faintest glow from the palm of his hand, and then stretched out, a column of chakra fountaining upwards. It flattened into a disk above them, widened until it was over both their heads, and then a hollow cylinder started to extend down, until it stopped at the level of their ankles. Wth some concentration, Naruto made the drifting layers of energy thinner, concentrated on changing the way it vibrated in place, and then it was no longer an opaque red, just a nearly clear layer of force tinted the slightest bit pink. The rain splattered across the solidified chakra, pooled atop it and slid down the sides in rivulets. It was like standing inside a little glass room, isolated from the rest of the world.

"Better than an umbrella, right?" he said, grinning.

"...Yes, it is. A little late, but," and, fascinated, she reached out and touched the shell of power, whispered, "very cool. Isn't it heavy?" She pointed at his raised arm.

"Huh? It's made of light, isn't it? It's weightless."

Sakura rubbed at her temples. "Oh crap, how does sempai stand teaching you, you moron? Can't you comprehend how incredible it is to be able to apply force to like this without any weight? Most chakra techniques that apply force, like wind and water and earth, even shadow techniques - the molded chakra manipulates existing matter, and it's that substance that applies the force, thus, they have weight! Your weird-ass monster power... it breaks all the rules."

Naruto tilted his head. Dumb smart people. Why did they have to make it all complicated? It worked, right? Maybe she'd feel better if he revealed, "I can make it heavy if I want!"

At that she just sighed and shook her head.

"What's wrong now?"

"Nothing, just. Hey, you know what? Let's just skip the morning classes, okay?"

"Huh? Oh. Sure, sure."

They had only just passed the original wall. There was something comforting about the older architecture. But it did make it a little tougher climbing up the side of a building and then having to negotiate the overhang of a pagoda-style roof. They sat atop an old tavern, seated on wet black tiles on the sloping roof, while the rain fell to within just a few feet of them, stopped and then slid down around Naruto's barrier.

"I just realized... there's no sound when the rain hits your light."

"Is that important? I can change it so that it sounds like a slate roof, if you like that better."

"No, keep it like this. It feels like we're more alone this way."

Sakura shivered then, and feeling like he ought to help, he tuned up the vibration of his energy.

"...Are you making it warmer?"

"Uh. Yeah. Should I stop?"

She shook her head, scooted closer against his side, put her head on his shoulder. The barrier flickered, actually disappearing completely for a few seconds before he got it up again, and Sakura was chuckling into his soaked, wet, flame-colored windbreaker.

Naruto cleared his throat, reddening. "What. Um. What are you doing?"

"I've never just sat like this with a boy, while he holds the rain off of us."


	34. Slacker

"Seniors picking on Chouji."

Damn. He was just getting relaxed too.

"Sensei, so why don't you do something about it?"

"Me, Nara-kun?"

Iruka's face twisted into a smirk.

"Class hours are over. Right now, I'm not a teacher, right?"

It was funny how silence could stretch out over the background music of the wind sliding down from the clouds, waking up the sleeping grass, setting leaves to flight.

"Teachers shouldn't be lazy like that."

That huge man stretched out onto the hillside next to Shikamaru, flung his limbs out in a graceless sprawl.

"It's a nice day. I only passed by the number three sparring room to pick up my stash. Anyway, a teacher can't fix all his students' problems."

Iruka tugged a flask out of his vest, took a long swig.

"You know, it all started of course when Tamara called Chouji a fatso. You should really help your friend work on his temper. I mean, he's more of a hothead than even the Orange-boy. He's even attacked me."

"He can't help it."

"But you can, can't you, Nara-kun?"

Another swig. Just the smell of it made Shikamaru's nose burn even from where he was.

"There's four of them. If it was just one or two, I think your friend could give them quite the thrashing. They're worthless, you know. I'd have flunked them already if I could, but I could never get proof of how they cheat. Haha, in that way, that makes them very fitting candidates for ninja, in any case. Except for those character flaws of theirs. I just don't know how much longer after the fight is done they'll keep hitting your friend."

Damn it! For a dumb barbarian, Sensei had his own way with words. Shikamaru could not get the picture out of his head now, of Chouji curled up on his side, while four bigger boys kept kicking at him. Chouji was tough - he would be fine regardless. This would only make him stronger.

But no matter what Shikamaru told himself, he couldn't stop his feet from moving his body down the hill, back to the west wing of the Academy.

"Always fun chatting with you, Nara-kun!"

"...You suck, Sensei!"

How the hell did that simple-minded combat-head manage to manipulate him all the time this way? It was why he'd had to work on his own manipulation skills, practice on the other students, but even then, even if he had gotten so good that he could tell what Sensei would say or do five steps ahead in their typical exchange, Sensei was the one who'd stay on his back watching the clouds, while Shikamaru would have to... DO STUFF. Like clean the classroom, or tutor the least gifted of the first-year students, or help check papers. Sensei was immune to embarrassment, could not be blackmailed. Well, Sensei could be bribed, but he already got whatever he felt like from Lee-sempai's prodigious kitchen and library of games and videos and tapes. What was a lazy genius to do faced with such opposition? Sometimes, it was less trouble to just give in - less energy expended.

The fuck! And now he was going to go pick a fight against bigger students. He was a frigging pacifist. He sucked at this stuff. Chouji was a way better fighter than he was.

"Stupid sensei," Shikamaru muttered. He was already running at that point, the soles of his sandals smacking hard against the earth as he imagined the feet of others kicking down.

Sparring room three. This was the most 'dojo-like' of the Academy sparring halls. Most of them were outdoor, or underground, very much like true battlefields, with the earth wounded by ditches and pits, trees brought down by fire, parts of the ceilings caving in due to repeated strikes with the more dangerous techniques that the Clan-students knew.

Room three was a big, empty room. The floor was covered with reed mats, the walls were clad in mirrors, from the high ceiling, soft white lights lit the room evenly.

Blood from Chouji's mouth was dripping on to the floor.

"You should just accept it," someone said, kicking Chouji in the gut. "You are fat. No need to fly off the handle every time you hear that. That's a bad habit. I'm doing you a favor of trying to break you out of it."

"Hey, looks like one of his classmates is here."

"Ha, well, so long as it's not that demon-brat. He's the only one that bitch Sakaki is close to."

"Is this one of your friends, Kohai? You should get him some bandages."

"...Eff. Geff ouda here... 'amaru..."

Shikamaru was not as good a fighter as Chouji. What the hell was he doing?

"You bullies. I don't know shit about you," he found himself saying through faked chuckles. "I know plenty of dirt on the seniors worth fearing. You four - you're just nobodies who are good at beating homework out of weaker kids. But I bet things got harder when Lee-san and Mihama-san suddenly got strong. You guys - you're not strong. You're nothing."

Shikamaru took another step toward them.

"I do hate taking out the trash. But all the extra time Onizuka-sensei has spent with me - maybe I at least have learned how to deal with garbage. He's so troublesome, that teacher."

He had known he was a genius from a very young age. Even amongst his family. Things just came to his mind so easily. Maybe too easily. Maybe, if he had faced a real obstacle sooner, he would have worked harder. This was what Shikamaru was thinking, as the four red-faced boys came at him. He couldn't think of a plan. He had no real jutsu yet. Popping some clones, he could do that, but not a greater number than there were opponents - one swipe and they'd be gone, and he would have that much less chakra.

Chakra.

To his legs, as he raced backwards out the hallway, and they came after him. They were faster. They had more chakra. And longer legs.

They were closing. Man, why was he even bothering to run? It's like, it would be more logical to just scrape and bow and crawl and apologize, and the beating would be less. If he made them work, the beating would be worse. Even if he somehow fought them, he would get hurt. His chest was already burning from running. This wasn't a stupid board game. He couldn't pause, analyze the state and select the optimal solution.

He was still thinking this, even as he made it through one doorway, just inches ahead of the reaching hand of his closest pursuer. He was still thinking of begging for mercy, when his body rolled forward, made him kick backwards with both feet and all his body weight, slamming the door hard on one enemy's elbow and also pushing himself forward, spinning.

"What the fuck am I doing?" Shikamaru cursed as his curved back rotated, shoulder brushing against the tiled floor, then his spine and hips, and he was back up to his feet, running without having lost any forward momentum, minus one opponent writhing on the ground, clutching at a broken arm.

Well it was too damned late to apologize now. They were going to bust up at least his arm at this point.

Shit. Why had he hung out so late at school? He could be fricking home right now. If Shikamaru hadn't been around, he would not have to be the subject of one of Sensei's 'Practical Life Lessons.' Sensei would've put a stop to those bullies picking on Chouji, and that would have been that! Why was Chouji even around this late anyway?

Okay, so think fast, genius. Head back to the hill where Sensei was? Hell, Sensei would just say, "I'm not a teacher now. It's too troublesome. Do what you want."

...That was out. The roof? That's where Sakura sometimes made out with Naruto. Naruto would destroy these guys.

Shit again! Naruto would be just as likely to get pissed at him and toss them all off the rooftop! That's what happened to their last classmate who had interrupted them! Unlike Kiba, Shikamaru was not willing to risk his neck to check on exactly how far their semi-reformed-class-delinquent had gotten with the no-longer-so-goody-two-shoes.

Whisper of air by his ear, the sting, something wet sliding down his cheek, the clatter of steel against the concrete walls.

Yeah, nice going, genius. He was thinking of other people to get him out of this, and in the meantime, the enemy had gotten serious. Not the dull ring of weighted, blunted iron practice weapons - that was the higher chime of hardened steel, live blades.

He had been too lazy to even carry his gear with him.

"You always have a weapon with you though."

That moron's words, at a time like this.

"Yeah, okay," Shikamaru whispered.

"We're going to bust you up, you little brat!"

They were spending quite a bit of energy on yelling. They would have caught him by now if they hadn't been wasting their breath so much.

At a fork, Shikamaru turned right. Yes, windows all along his left. He leaped forward in a tight ball, crashing through the glass, protecting his face with his arms. They turned the corner then and saw the broken glass, saw his figure running into the tree line outside.

And when the first boy jumped out after him, Shikamaru reached up from his deep crouch below the window, grabbed the enemy around his neck, pulled him down, hard, so that he slammed face first into the earth. Knock out.

Two to go, one bunshin's worth of chakra expended, as well as the amount he had spent so far on running.

"Ganryu! Fuck! This slippery rat's making us look bad!"

"Not through that window, you ass, we can't see where he is!"

Yes, talk amongst yourselves. That gave Shikamaru time to pat this smelly guy down. Smoke bomb, excellent.

As the last two simultaneously crashed through two windows, twenty feet apart, on each side of Shikamaru, he triggered the smoke bomb.

"We'll get you now, you twerp!"

When the smoke cleared, there were two of Shikamaru. One hopped backwards through the window he had come out of in the first place, ran back down the hall, and the other ran forward towards the trees.

"Fuck!"

They drew shuriken and threw. The whirling blades struck, one in the shoulder, one on the opposite hip. That was enough to 'kill' the Shikamaru running for the trees, and even as it disappeared in a puff of smoke, they were already back in the hall, chasing after the other one.

When they were out of sight, a pebble lying where the Shikamaru they had taken out had fallen poofed into smoke, revealed that he had been the real thing all along. He tore strips from his shirt, wrapped them tight around his wounds.

And thought about his choices.

At this point, he could just leave, get help. But then, if they just decided to go back and take it out on Chouji...

No choice at all but to run and get beat, at least he would be beaten at his friend's side.

Outside the hallway, the door of sparring room three. He was out of breath, the aches of his exhausted diaphragm spreading outwards to his whole abdomen. He was just on the edge of puking.

Opened the door.

Shikamaru fell to his knees. No way! No way would it get this bad, not from just starting with someone calling another person a name!

The blood was pooling on the mats under Chouji's limp, broken shape, spreading outwards, spreading everywhere - it filled Shikamaru's vision. One of those goons kicked at his friend's head, and blood sprayed far, so very far. Warm droplets of it landed on Shikamaru's cheek.

He clapped his hands and focused.

"Kai!"

Well, shit. He still couldn't break loose, and that was his best attempt.

"No point in continuing it, Osaka-chan! Even if he can't break your genjutsu, he doesn't think it's real anymore."

The pain though... Looking down at the wounds where he should have been cut, he only saw deep bruises the size of sensei's thumbprints.

Shikamaru fell on to his side, gasped, slowly started recovering his breath.

'Chouji' stood up and shrank, revealing a puppet made of iron. That thick-browed rich guy whose name completely escaped Shikamaru's mind at the moment stepped out from behind it and waved. Right, still no normal jutsu for him, but he had, in his own way, developed chakra control and projection. Enough for strings...

Two of the thugs shrank, turning into Kasuga-sempai and Mihama-sempai.

"Shoot! Osaka-chan," the tiny Mihama girl frowned fiercely as she punched the taller Kasuga repeatedly in the shoulder, "I told you not to put so much blood! The smart ones figure it out every time coz of that!"

"Heee, it was long enough though, right, Sensei? I was getting a headache holding the genjutsu so long. There were a lot of effects I was holding on Nara-chan, the light, distortion of time-sense, fear, breathing..."

The other one, the one whose arm he'd thought he'd broken, did not shrink, but grew quite a lot... And on her arm - Sakaki-sempai only had light bruising from the door slamming shut on it. She was smiling a bit as she shook her arm and murmured softly, "Nice move with the door."

He shivered a little at how tough she was.

The last thug, the one Shikamaru had pulled face-first into the dirt, was there too, and he became positively huge, getting a foot taller and about eighty pounds of muscle broader.

Shikamaru was pleased that Iruka-sensei's nose was at least a little bloody.

"So, Nara-kun," the asshole said, grinning, "did you get this lesson?"

Fuck with the lessons!

Shikamaru slid back up to the wall, used it to creep upwards to a sitting position. "Ugh. How'd I fall for this? I shoulda seen it."

"Don't feel too bad. It's hard to think straight when your body's high on adrenaline, and of course, Osaka-chan's genjutsu ability is top-notch."

Sensei crouched over him, the steely eyes looking into his. Shikamaru looked away. It was all so freaking troublesome.

"The real question, Nara-kun, which you haven't answered yet is, did you learn this lesson?"

Steel fingers clamped around Shikamaru's jaw, brought his face up.

"Hmm. A nice look in my cute student's eyes! Yes, I see you have learned it."

Yeah. He got it.

The worst bit though, was having to listen to Sensei talk through it anyway, just to be extra-sure that Shikamaru remembered it.

Man, he hated having to listen to lectures.

Lousy ninja, average ninja, strong ninja, that wasn't the point. What was important was making the most of oneself. If he had trained a little harder, maybe he would have already mastered the first of his Clan's shadow techniques - it would have made the situation entirely different, giving him a lot more choices. He could have saved the fake Chouji, if he had been a little stronger... When they became genin in... ugh, only a year and a half... how long would it be before his team got into a real life situation where maybe just a little bit more strength, a little more stamina, just one more technique, might be the difference between a comrade dying or lasting long enough for a medic to get to him or her?

That's what Sensei was telling him, which was irritating because he knew it already, shit.

But he supposed... maybe he really ought to work harder at learning that crud his dad was always pushing on him.

And he had to get Chouji over his freaking oversensitivity. No getting beat up because someone said the word 'fat' - no way. Anyway... the guy was his best friend but the truth is, he was FAT, damn it!


	35. Missing

"It's a nice day, isn't it?"

It was.

Walking along the top of the long fence alongside the Academy, Lee behind her. For him it was balance practice, for her it was just enjoying the warm wind drifting along. Sliding deeper into fall, these warm days would become less and less frequent. While it did not actually snow in Fire Nation except in the very highest mountains, the cold season could still be felt in Konoha. All those forests, the shade of the trees. Sometimes the temperature would dip enough to frost windows in the mornings, and certainly, everyone dressed a little heavier. Thicker kimonos for the traditionalists, leather or denim or fur for others more willing to try out the old styles being recreated from the lost cities from before the Days of Fire.

The breeze blew the dry leaves up from the piles on the ground, sent them drifting along in the sun.

"Hey, look up there. Naruto and his girl are waving at us."

They waved back up at the roof.

Sakaki liked the new look on that girl.

Not so much in the first few days after she had dyed her hair black, but now, when the ends were still black and it came out that delicate pink at the roots. She also seemed a lot more relaxed. Sakaki supposed that they were good for each other - certainly, Naruto needed more structure in his life. And that Haruno - it must have been nice to have someone a little dangerous, but mostly safe, who would be as daring as she wanted or as comforting.

Lee looked a little cross just then.

"Jealous, Lee?"

"Haha, well. I guess so. It would be nice to have someone to kiss like that, don't you think? Umm."

Sakaki had long grown used to ignoring Lee's words when his expression reflected that he didn't know he was talking. Sometimes, it was still funny. And sometimes, when he'd blurt out secret thoughts about wanting to kiss her and the soft warmth of her lips and how he wished he could hold her tight, he was utterly embarrassing.

"Uh. So, Lee, how are you coming along with the modifications to your puppets?"

That usually got his mind off of her. Somewhat.

"Ah, it's going great! I mean, my techniques aren't nearly so refined, probably, as the Suna puppeteers, since I'm teaching myself out of a book - but I bet they'd be surprised when my puppets blast through theirs. I still don't have that much fine control, but if I just pour it in, my iron puppets can really do a lot of damage! Helps me fake clones too - I think I'll be able to have it down in time to pass the last exam."

The last exam. It was so close.

Soon, her goal would be a little less far away.

"Oh, look at that!" Lee exclaimed, shaking his fists so violently he almost spilled off the steel fence. "Even Neji is dating someone! Man."

Sakaki frowned too. Not that she was envious or jealous, but she didn't think she quite approved of that Tenten girl. Oh, she was plenty serious about her training, but Sakaki would have liked someone a little more... affectionate maybe, for Neji. As Lee and her walked on, their two classmates were circling, dusty and sweaty as their feet pounded the earth and blades flickered back and forth.

"Are they really going out? It's like they just use each other for practice all the time. I mean, you, me, Neji, Osaka and Chiyo all do that together all the time."

"He does like her though," Lee said, shrugging. "He almost smiles when he's around her."

Well, at least Neji had gotten over her. It had been just a bit creepy when he'd started crushing on her after she had beaten him up the year before.

Speaking of creepy...

"I don't see that kid around these days. Maybe he's gotten over it."

"Why don't you just fight him? He's had a few months - I'm sure he's learned a lot from that loss to Neji."

Sakaki shook her head. As they passed a tree that had gotten a little overgrown, she swept her palm forward at the branches. A wide swath of branches and leaves turned to dust before her, blown away on the wind.

"I don't know how much I can limit my strength these days. I think he'd get hurt. The last couple of months, when I start thinking of fighting, something changes in my hands. They just... go through things. I wonder if it's something in the way Iruka-sensei is teaching me? I can always will it to come out, but I can't always stop it when I don't need it."

At that, Lee had to nod. When they sparred with her, only Naruto could go one-on-one with Sakaki at this point. Everyone else, Neji and him, Osaka and Chiyo-chan, they had to team up, at least three of them at a time. And they were far ahead of everyone else in the Academy. Even at the Dojo, the only ones left who could train with her were the masters, Iruka-sensei, Eikichi-sensei, and Nagano-sempai, most senior of the civilian students.

"Naruto's turning out good, isn't he?" Lee murmured. "He's very close to being able to sense through his light, and he can change it now to other primary colors. Soon, he can make something like illusions. Do you think he understands the endpoint of what Chiyo's trying to get him to do?"

"Probably not. He's not a thinker - but he'll surprise us with what he comes up with, when he does get there. He will be very powerful."

"Hehe, you think he could make Hokage? Since meeting you, sometimes he lets it slip - 'I understand what this power is for now,' 'I wonder if being Hokage is worthwhile,' and such."

"A Hokage that can't use normal jutsu - it could happen, if it's Naruto. The Yondaime... what he did to the Kyuubi and his son, it's incredible."

She looked at the watch on her wrist.

"I wonder what's keeping Chiyo-chan. Visiting hours at the hospital will be over soon if we don't get going."

"It is getting late, isn't it?"

Their stride halted, and they looked at each other. Mihama Chiyo was never late. Not in all the time they'd known her. And when it had something to do with her mother...

"Get them going, Lee. I'll go on to the hospital, and check her workplaces. You guys look around the Academy grounds."


	36. Failure

"Chiyo-chan..." Sakaki whispered. Not too much blood loss. But her face... "I'll just be a moment, okay?"

Sakaki opened her kit, pressed gauze pads to her friend's bloody head, wrapped it around gently, leaving space for her open mouth into which she slipped a blood pill to keep her going until this was settled. She took off her vest, laid it on top of Chiyo-chan. Her friend was so tiny she seemed to disappear beneath the thick leather. Lastly, she kicked at a stack of canned stuff, controlled the descent of the mountain of tins - it formed a series of hills around the little girl. She hoped that would be enough to protect her until the fight was done.

She straightened, turned to Sasuke. He was trembling, bouncing around on the balls of his feet. Darkness spun in the black and red whirlpool of his eyes.

"Come on then!" he said, "I'm excited already!"

She felt the energy coming, turned it away. A subtle genjutsu that would have affected her balance. Another one that would have displaced his image backwards by an inch. Again, she let the energy slide off her spirit, her mind. A third attempt to induce anxiety.

"What the... how are you doing that?" Sasuke said, frowned. "Did that teacher of ours give you some cheating bloodline?"

"...You should concern yourself with staying alive, Uchiha."

Sakaki had no special doujutsu. So she did not understand exactly how she was doing this. All that additional chakra training and she had never been able to do this before - to see the color of the wind, and taste the residual chi in the air. She could smell the bioelectricity in her opponent's body, hear the vibration of the ground under her feet. Did Sensei see the world this way all the time? Just two days ago, she would have succumbed to this cruel brat's genjutsu.

She unlocked the switch in her mind, removing the limiters on her body chemistry and muscle response. Her breathing was slow and powerful. Her muscles bulged, and the t-shirt and tights on her body stretched, tore in places. She stripped them off. She didn't give a shit about being just in her panties and bra. She wanted nothing holding her back, nothing slowing her down for this. She focused her spirit, combined it with the body energy already roaring through her coils. The dust on the ground around them was blasted back by waves of pressure that also pushed back at him.

"I'm under-aged, Sempai. And cow-tits like yours don't do it for me."

"I'm going to kill you, Uchiha Sasuke," Sakaki said quietly, taking a step forward. She wasn't going to be distracted by anything today.

Then, perhaps there was a flicker in his eyes that could have been fear. She crushed the part of her heart that empathized with his insecurities, his pain, his ambition. It was easy, seeing Chiyo's mutilated face.

A blast of heat as he leaped back and rained fireballs upon her. She swept them aside with her arms, disrupting the chakra manipulation holding the heat together in spheres that sustained the chemical reaction of combustion. They fizzled out with loud, hissing sounds. Easier than deflecting the deadly red light that Naruto wielded. Not even close to the same intensity, the compression of dense power that let Naruto form solid objects out of the light.

She took another step forward.

He danced around from shadow to shadow, drew throwing blades and sent them at her, gleaming flashes as they reflected the neon light coming in through the big empty windows of the warehouse. Up close, the mirror sheen blades caught the golden radiance around her body. There were chakra strings attached to the weapons, to control their paths if she should dodge.

She plucked them out of the air, and crushed them, twisting the steel between her fingers. He would not be using these toys again.

He turned to retreat deeper into the darkness among the piles of stockpiled cans and bottles of preserved vegetables and drums of cooking oil, detonated the explosive seals he had trapped the area with. As flames and smoke and flour and burning bits of wood and plastic billowed outwards from the main storage hall, he skipped past the tripwires and net traps and spike traps towards the stairs. But when he raced down a clear path between two tall rows of stacked pallets heavy with sacks of grain, she was suddenly there, right at the base of the stairwell. There had not even been the sound of her footsteps.

"Haven't you wanted this, Kohai? Haven't you been asking for this battle for months? Why are you putting it off now?" She almost didn't recognize the mangled voice forced out of her own mouth. "Anyway... you should give up trying to run. You don't have the speed to get away from me."

A puff of smoke and he seemingly split into three. The three Sasuke images leaped up into the air in different directions, doubling back towards the main hall, running into the smoke and the wet spray of the sprinkler system.

Her arms flicked forward, ribbons of chakra sliding out from her fingertips just brushing against the illusions before they could gain distance, again disrupting the energy holding Sasuke's technique together.

When he landed on the support trusses bracing the ceiling high above the dusty floor, he turned, and saw her right in front of him, in arm's reach again.

Sasuke's eyes were wide now. The confidence was long gone.

Slowly, Sakaki stretched out a hand towards his face. The light coming off her made his face seem paler, sickly.

He yelled, stepped back, kicked sideways at her right knee, again at the other knee. He recovered, wobbled on the slippery wet steel.

"Come on, Kohai. Haven't you attended the upperclassmen's demonstrations? You'll have to hit my legs a lot harder to hurt me. In fact, I felt the bones in your foot shift with those impacts. Did you hurt yourself? Doesn't feel good, does it?"

Her voice just kept getting lower.

Sasuke charged at her, started unloading a combination that opened with a feinted roundhouse kick at her temple, switched at the last minute into a handstand that let him alter the trajectory into a sweeping, upside-down thrust kick at her jaw. Well, it was going to be a combination. He could probably see her counter coming, an overhand right towards his head. Changing the angle of his strike to compensate, kicking at her hand instead.

Fool. She could guess that he thought his kick would hurt her fist more than the other way around. Had this been at the Academy, with other teachers watching, she would have just dodged back or side-stepped, or done one of the fancy flowing circular parries she had started to pick up from Neji.

Sakaki had no interest in making this a sparring match. Not now.

The dense, thick bones of the first two knuckles on her right hand smashed into his rising heel. The inch-thick rubber sole was compressed to the point of losing all elasticity. And then the force of her blow just kept going. It shattered his foot.

"Stop screaming. It's unbecoming," she said, holding him upside down by the other leg, over the floor, forty feet below.

He was sobbing. He kept looking at his demolished foot, at the way the exposed toes splayed out unnaturally through the front of his sandal, at the way the heel was just not there, and jagged bone ends had torn their way out of his ankle, white fragments exposed through bloody wounds opened up from the inside. His calf was swollen, bulging - the fibula had broken off of the knee from the way the force had traveled up the ankle and forced the bones back, one end of it poking out through the thick muscle. The blood trailed its way up his thighs, soaking his shorts.

She pulled her free hand back. The light around it became fierce, became white-hot sun-fire.

"That's enough, Sakaki-chan."

"Sensei..."

And then she felt tears burning their way along her cheeks. She had noticed his approach - he hadn't been hiding it. If she had gone just a bit faster, this prick would already be dead.

"Look at what he did to Chiyo-chan, Sensei." Her throat was closing in on itself.

"I know. You know I'm a good healer - I'll fix her right up. You give the brat to me now, Sakaki-chan."

Sakaki released the power, let it flow back in from her muscles. As always, she felt the slight crash afterwards as her body complained at all the chemicals it had burned through so quickly.

"O-okay. Sensei."

She grimaced, shoved the bawling kid into Iruka's big hands, crouched down on the steel beam, and hugged her knees against herself. This was not how she wanted a man to see her in her underwear for the first time.

"You... you go fix her now. Sensei. Please." She put her hands on her face. "I don't want her to wake up and see herself like that."

"Just one second, Sakaki-chan. I know you hate it, but if I don't fix this idiot's ankle right away, he'll be crippled permanently."

He dropped Sasuke hard on his ass, on the support truss.

"Stop that sniveling," Iruka said. "You got what you wanted. Deal with the consequences."

The fire was out, and the sprinklers ceased.

Part of Sakaki wanted to stay up there and listen to that little shit's screams as Sensei put his foot and leg back together. Instead, she slid off the cold, rusty steel, took the jump with just the slightest bit of chakra expended to spread out the force and keep from breaking her legs. She padded over to Chiyo-chan, who was still on her side, still tied up. She broke the chains easily, but as quietly as she could. Chiyo-chan murmured incoherently in her sleep, blood oozing out the hole in her cheek. Sakaki could see her friend's teeth through that hole. She could see some of the bones of her friend's skull, revealed by flaps of flesh peeled back. Slowly, Sakaki touched her friend's soft, brown hair.

Above them, she heard the Uchiha start shrieking louder.

"Noooo! No!" he said, "You can't do that!"

Then Sensei was down there with them, his big shadow covering both of the girls. But when Sakaki looked up, he was still next to that Uchiha, whispering fiercely into his ear.

"How are you doing that, Sensei?"

"Advanced clone technique, took me forever to learn. Energy's not meant to stay static like that. It's enough to deal with the boy for now. Let's see here. Yes. He used a sharp knife, that will make it easier."

First, her pressed his fingers into spots under Chiyo-chan's jaw. Sakaki could hear her friend's breathing settling down, sense the younger girl easing into a deeper sleep.

He opened up a kit, pulled sterile pads out and wiped and cleaned the wounds. And then his hands were glowing, pulsing soft white and green and blue as he traced the lacerations and incisions on his student's face, pressed the flaps of torn flesh into place, layer by layer. It was magical, the way edges met and closed, connective tissues, muscle and membranes knitting together.

Sakaki cleared her throat, bit her lip. Normally, she would be watching closely, fascinated at the tremendous, flowing energy held tightly and controlled with such efficiency. She was the only genin at the Academy that could manage any healing jutsu so soon, but this was another level. He was doing magnificent fine work, not just restoring the flesh but also preventing any scarring, a lot harder to do with the delicate skin on the face. It was a master version of what she did to herself all the time after getting banged up at the Dojo or with Naruto - she had to take so much more time to heal much easier cuts. Sensei was doing days' worth of cosmetic surgery in minutes.

They stayed like that for an hour, and all the while, the Uchiha in the rafters was crying out.

The relief was bubbling up through her so hard it made her weak at the knees. Chiyo-chan would be fine. And... Sakaki had not killed that boy.

Above them, the Uchiha was really going crazy. Iruka-sensei's clone picked him up, bounded out through the skylight into the starry night.

"What's his problem?" Sakaki muttered. "He got off lucky."

"I just sealed away his Sharingan. Permanently. He can still be a ninja, but this horseshit made me realize I've been neglecting him, just because he ticks me off. This is my fault," and Sensei's twisted, angry face made something in Sakaki want to... pat his back or something.

"It's not - "

"As a teacher of ninja. I should've been able to tell something like this was coming. His jealousy, the way he felt he was falling behind even Naruto... I should have noticed. I have an obligation now, to that moron. I need to be a better teacher to him."

Sometimes, she felt like she understood him better than anyone else, but right now, she didn't get it at all.

"There. All done."

After wiping the last traces of blood off her face, it was like Chiyo-chan had never been cut at all, and then Sakaki put her arms around the little girl and sighed as she felt Chiyo-chan starting to stir.

"...Aki-chan? Wh-where am... Is my mom okay?"

"She's," and then Sakaki was smiling, though the tears hadn't quite stopped yet, "Yeah, she's just fine."

Chiyo-chan's eyes changed, then her little hands were up and touching her cheeks, her eyelids, her mouth. "I thought... I thought he did stuff. To me."

"Sensei just finished fixing it. I'll take you home now, huh?"

She was starting to drift off again, embraced Sakaki tight. "'Kay. Knew... knew you would find me. 'M sorry. He had his hands on Mom's life support. Couldn't... couldn't fight, after. Cheap-shotted by that Sharingan."

"It's okay, Chiyo-chan. She's fine. You did what you could to protect her."

"I'll... protect you too... someday. Kinda sleepy now."

Of course. Regardless of Sensei's healing skills, she had still lost blood. Sakaki's kit was still there where she had left it, next to Chiyo-chan. She pulled out a couple of bottles, popped them open.

"Take this blood pill, and this one is a painkiller. Then sleep. Okay?"

"Okay." Chiyo-chan gulped it down with some effort, waved sleepily at the dark shadow of Iruka-sensei. "Thanks, Aki-chan. Thanks, Sensei."

Sakaki felt hot, was bright red, actually. She wondered if Chiyo-chan noticed. She could feel Sensei's eyes on her.

Did Sensei just look at her butt? No way. She resisted the urge try to hide herself, very aware of her white cotton underthings clinging to her skin.

She felt very warm as he put the jacket over her shoulders.

"You get her home, Sakaki-chan. I'm going to have to fill out some paperwork because of this."

"It was all his fault, wasn't it Sensei? I guess it all goes back to normal tomorrow, doesn't it?"

"Hrmm. You know that's not what's going to happen."

Chiyo-chan wailed the next day in class, when Mizuki-sensei came in and announced that Onizuka-sensei had been dismissed from his teaching post.


	37. Beginnings

Warm air coming in from the window. Just the beginnings of summer heat, hot breezes from distant places, the taste of barbecue and celebrating in the air. He wanted to be someplace else at the moment, really. Maybe fighting with someone, maybe just doing some random vandalism, maybe watching and making snide remarks as the three girls that had somehow become his family struggled to cook dinner for themselves and him at the new apartment they shared. That was always an adventure, particularly since they insisted on using every chore as a training exercise. Slicing things with high level techniques, cooking things with chakra fire, cleaning things with water and wind.

It was weird, not living alone.

Well. Not as weird as it could have been, given how often the eldest girl had been passing by his place to make sure he had a decent dinner. But now, with all four of them in one place, it did feel a bit odd. Not in a bad way though... But it was irritating when Sakura would come by and the girls would make way too big a deal out of everything.

"Are you alright, Uzumaki?"

He was cringing at the memory of the way-too-young Chiyo-chan lecturing him and Sakura about safe sex while passing them a box of condoms.

"Uh, yeah. Fine."

This was it. He'd pushed his control well beyond any limits he had thought possible, because that bratty little sempai wouldn't stop needling him.

"Henge."

He did so. It wasn't a normal one, with a matrix draped over one's body distorting space in a shell of chakra manipulated through hand-seals into a certain appearance. His was pure light, held in place and in the appropriate frequencies of color based on his will, and intense concentration, holding on to the image of the Sandaime.

"Well, kid. That is impressive control. Now, bunshin. Three, if you can."

Still holding the shape-illusion, Naruto focused. He summoned more of his inner light, manifested it, shaped it into clones at his sides.

"Err. I meant that you could drop the illusion and then form clones, but it's certainly something that you can maintain clones and have them in a different shape - enh, of course - with your ability, it makes no difference making a clone your shape or another shape. Say... Are those solid?"

His face was impassive, but sweat poured down Naruto's back.

"Do you want them to be?" It would only take marginally more energy. "Right now, you can walk right through them, but I can make them like rock if you like."

"Ah... haha."

Mizuki's eyebrow twitched. Naruto could smell his fear. That was something he learned from Osaka, the ability to smell emotions. If he knew how hard this was for Naruto to do, maybe sensei wouldn't be so impressed. It was taking a lot out of him.

Without mudras to mold Naruto's techniques, they would always require more concentration and energy... This level he had attained was only possible because he had more energy than he knew what to do with, and there was nothing quite like fighting with Catgirl-sempai to hone concentration, especially since she had started with that crazy Southern Cross martial art or whatever - now she could cut through stuff with a touch, and could blast through his light energy with punches and kicks. He did not want to know what her attacks could do if they landed on his body. Her strength had grown very quickly since graduating the year before, and only months after, she and Chiyo-chan and Osaka-chan had made chuunin. And they wouldn't let up on him at all, not even at the apartment. Actually, they weren't as bad as Neji and Lee, who had pushed his training that much more when the girls made chuunin and their instructor wouldn't even let them participate in the exam.

"Watch this, Sensei. Bonus points, right?"

Naruto blinked, and so did his clones, and then one of his Sandaime-shaped clones grew a foot in height, its arms extending into wicked scythe-blades, and another clone shrank and took on the appearance of Chiyo-chan. His third clone hopped lightly towards Naruto's arms, the outer layers of light peeling away and stretching, and as it became a leaf-bladed spear longer than Naruto was tall, the boy caught it in his hands.

Just to be cute, Naruto picked up a large piece of chalk next to the blackboard, tossed it up into the air and sliced, once with the spear, twice with the blades of the monster-Sarutobi-clone, then, caught the pieces in the delicate little hands of the Chiyo-clone.

Mizuki cleared his throat, muttered, "You pass. Send in Haruno."

He released the light, watched the flecks of brilliance dissolve and slide and fade. Since he had reached the point where he could manage clones, he always felt strange releasing them. They didn't hold his thoughts or memories or anything like that, but he could see and hear and touch what they could, and when they dissolved into flickering motes of light, he wondered if the tugging he felt at his own energies was a little like what death must feel like, or if it was merely like rivers flowing back into the sea.

Ugh. It was Sakura that got him thinking weird stuff like that. She would have a much easier time through this part of the exam than he did.

All this extra thinking was good for something though. It distracted him from the growing unease he had started to feel around Mizuki since Iruka-sensei had left. There was something... off... in the way that Mizuki looked at him.

Then he was faced with a mop of black and pink hair in his face. Sometimes, Sakura would just go up to him and embrace him tight without saying anything.

It always felt nice, but it was also just a bit scary to know she trusted him like this. It was definitely unfamiliar territory. Just like everything else between them.

"Hey, it's you."

"I'm nervous."

Finally, she let go. Still wouldn't look him in the eye though.

"Come on. I made it, right?"

"I dont know - hey!"

A smack on the butt always got her out of her drifty thinking. It was worth the retaliatory fist to the face.

"Not nervous now, right?"

"You're still a jerk," but she was smiling as she walked in and closed the door behind her.

Naruto walked over to one of the windows overlooking the sparring grounds below. Underclassmen were having their end-of-term exhibition matches down there.

"So, will you fight me now?"

"No, Uchiha. Man, give it a rest."

But really... since... whatever it was that had happened that Sasuke and Chiyo-chan and Catgirl-sempai would never talk about... Sasuke had gradually changed. At first, he was a worse asshole than ever. But then, he sort of, kind of, mellowed out. Still a worse jerk than Neji, but definitely an improvement. At least he wasn't muttering under his breath while watching all their classmates using the Sharingan and copying their moves. Not that he had a choice about it, with whatever had been done to seal off his blood line. But definitely, he seemed to have gotten a little less out there.

And now, Sasuke was always extremely deferential to the girls. If Naruto didn't know better, he would think the nut-job had some kind of fatal attraction thing going on with all three girls. Which would be definitely wrong, in Chiyo-chan's case. They treated him very coldly, but Sasuke more or less did everything possible with the remnants of his family connections to get better treatment for Chiyo-chan's mother, among a hundred lesser odd favors he did for them.

And also, there was the talking. The spontaneous conversations he would strike up with Naruto. Definitely, some crazy shit had gone down between his house-mates and Sasuke.

"I'll see you tomorrow."

"You're not going to wait?"

"Tomorrow is assignment to teams. I passed, you passed, Haruno will pass for sure."

Then Sasuke let out a sound that was suspiciously close to a sigh. Maybe it was a groan. Naruto took a careful, shallow sniff of the air as he leaned back, hoping it wasn't cover for a quiet fart. It would be just like an Uchiha to be 'silent but deadly.'

"You don't know we'll all be on one team."

"Of course we will, fool. I have to be on his team, because he's the only one that can fix my eyes. You have to be on his team, because the other jounin are afraid of you. Sakura has to be on your team, because the adults think that she keeps you stable."

Naruto shook his head, chuckling.

"Man, why'd they be scared of me, Uchiha? I'm just some unstable experiment of a desperate father."

"Because at last year's end of term match, you fought with... with Sakaki-dono."

"...I'm going to find out what happened between you some day."

Sasuke grit his teeth, looked away. A haunted look to the eyes, that's what it was. Naruto was familiar with that look. It was like when he had cut Sakaki-sempai, way back when, just when she was going out of her way to heal him.

Only worse. Whereas before, Sasuke had mostly burned with that quiet, intense anger, it had been overshadowed by a shadow over his eyes, a dimming down. Some of that hatred that used to drive him had been replaced by a kind of fear. It had actually started to reduce the attraction all the girls had for him, though Naruto couldn't imagine why quiet, angry Sasuke should be so appealing to girls and quiet, depressed Sasuke was less so.

"There's nothing... redeeming... about such knowledge. It took a long time to realize what's been done for my welfare. I saw something in myself that day. There is something... very wrong... with the Sharingan."

"...The fuck are you talking about?"

Sasuke shied back. If Sakura had seen it, she would have mock-whispered to Naruto: 'A case of acute, burning embarrassment.'

"Anyway, you know well why the others are scared of you. After you and her went all out, there was a crater two hundred feet deep next to the school."

"Ah, man, they stopped us just when it was getting good. GUFFF!"

A hundred pounds of wiry girl tackled him from behind and more or less wrapped itself around him.

"I passed!" Sakura cackled. One hand rumpled his hair. Her other arm was snaked under his chin. Her legs were locked tight around his torso.

"Blaarrgh."

"...I don't really care, but maybe you two shouldn't do that kinky stuff in public."

"Bite my ass, Uchiha!" she said, then stuck her tongue out.

"I think Orange-boy is trying to tap out, Haruno-chan. Nice rear-naked-choke."

All the students in the hall stopped what were doing, only Sakura actually yelled out, "Iruka-sensei!"

"Yo!"

He was hanging upside down just outside the window. The golden hair had darkened somewhat, his bronze tan was even deeper, and the old scar that crossed his face from cheek to cheek across his nose was joined by another that slashed a pale line from his forehead, just to one side of his left eye, and down to his jaw.

Other than that... it may have been the odd angle of seeing him upside down, but he seemed somehow leaner and smaller, but denser. Huge. There was much more of a presence than before, something that made Naruto want to bust out a hundred clones and start fighting or something.

But the smile was the same, a cheeky grin. Facetious, and sincere. Cruel and gentle.

Sakura was babbling about the medical techniques she had been learning from Sakaki, Sasuke was looking at the big goon with a strange, tortured expression. The other students mostly went back to their own thing, some crying quietly or sobbing about flunking, some talking about their coming celebratory dinner, and some still fidgeting, waiting their turn for the last part of the exam.

"Yeah, well, I'm still not allowed on school grounds, so technically, I'm trespassing."

"Did you make it?" Sasuke said, his whisper slicing the distance between them, cutting off Sakura's excited speech.

"Oh, sure, Uchiha-chan, was there ever any doubt? I'm now the newest jounin of Konoha. Of course, they would have made me one a long time ago, but I never filled out the paperwork and took the tests."

"And?"

"You three are my team."

"Hmmff."

"Hey, what's that about, asshole!" Naruto called after the other, who was stalking his way down the hall, more or less clearing a path before him with a twisted, foul kind of killing intent.

"Go easy on him. He's now one of your partners, Orange-head."

"Sensei, why is Naruto still Orange-head? He doesn't really wear orange much anymore."

Really, Naruto knew that Sakura only asked because lately, she and his house-mates had taken total and tyrannical control of his wardrobe.

"Oh, sure, now he's wearing serious dark blue ninja-ing stuff, but deep inside, Uzumaki will always be an orange-head. Can't help it, you know. It's in the genes. Just like how the Uchiha brat can't really help being a psycho."

Naruto cleared his throat. It was a snarl. He was also sporting a mass of glittering swords of light hovering around him.

"Okay, okay, nothing 'bout the parents. You still haven't gotten over your complex, Orange-boy? Anyway. I just dropped by to make it official. Fuhgeddaboud tomorrow being introductions and having some dumb-shit extra test another day. Tomorrow, we got our first mission."

"A mission?"

"I'm supposed to do all this official boring extra test and evaluation blah blah but I have no interest in that junk. You'll have to tell psycho-boy about it and make sure he meets us on time tomorrow at dawn. You'll like it, Naruto, guaranteed danger. Some feeble drunkard is having a problem with gangsters and there's a bridge in there somewhere or other, whatever. Main thing is, he's lying and so we get to take it on right away, but don't be surprised when danger pops out and stuff! And it's out of town. A day each way by train, figure two weeks stay in Wave."

That got him going.

"Yeeeees!" Naruto exclaimed, "Dangerous mission! Awesome!"

He had a long ways to catching up to the girls. He would never admit it, but he was absolutely envy-green whenever Sakaki and Chiyo and Osaka would return from a mission and talk shop. Well, actually, Catgirl-sempai never liked to talk about stuff afterwards, but Osaka was loads of fun, showing him the actual action using genjutsu, with Chiyo-chan providing tactical commentary. The best part was how Osaka-chan always put in more blood than there really was, while Chiyo-chan would try desperately to keep up her lecture as though it didn't bother her. Sometimes, Osaka would throw in completely random imagery, adding weird floaty cats that would cheer during the fights, or doing more subtle things like making it look like Chiyo-chan's pigtails would wiggle up and down or change position on her head.

The floating cats always freaked out Catgirl-sempai, just a bit. Made her eyebrows twitch.

He couldn't be sure, but he suspected that Sakura was pretty jealous too - she always brought pizza with her on the girls' post-mission nights.

"Ooo, on a trip with just manly guys around me," Sakura smirked. "Mom and Dad will hate it. How fun."

"East gate, okay? And dawn. Seeya suckers."

Iruka dropped away from the wall outside, fell face-first several stories, flipped, landed lightly on his feet. The white linen blazer hanging from his hand over his shoulder flapped away from him in the breeze, and with the other hand, he raised a cigarette to his lips. The sun was setting.

"Sensei!" Sakura and Naruto called to him from the window.

"What?"

"Will you make us strong?"

His grin was lit up by the sun, even from that distance away. He gave them a thumbs up and roared, "I'll make you three the strongest! That's a promise from Great Jounin Onizuka! It all starts now!"

--The (First) End--


End file.
